Emoticons & Emojis: the art of digital smiles
How it all started
It's the year 2200. These are the adventures of the spaceship Enterprise, with its ... CUT, wrong movie. ? So again: It's the year 1982. In Pittsburgh, USA, Professor of Computer Science Scott E. Fahlman sits at his computer and writes messages on a bulletin board, the forerunner of today's discussion forum. If his comments are meant to be funny, ironic, or sarcastic, he uses the string :-) as a signal for? Attention, Humor ?.
His idea is spreading rapidly in the bulletin board, and also his second suggestion, the string :-( to use as a term for grief or anger, quickly develops a life of its own. Nowadays, the distribution of these first emoticons would probably be viral? but in 1982 the World Wide Web is still seven years into the future. In the then current Internet predecessor? Arpanet? There are only a few hundred computers networked worldwide.
Emoticon - A Conceptual Explanation
At the name emoticon is it a so-called? Portmanteauwort ?, composed of English terms emotion (Mood, feeling) and Icon (Symbol). Emoticons are mainly used in loose, digital communication, for example in chats, SMS, discussion forums and e-mails. They serve to express a feeling, a mood or a state of mind. With a few signs, the recipient of a message can be made to understand the emotional context of the sender. The emoticons, which consist only of the characters of the keyboard, date back to the time when only text messages could be sent via computer or mobile phone.
The term emoticon is not used consistently. On the one hand, it refers to symbols that consist only of American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) characters, ie the common character set. Best known example: :-) On the other hand, and misleadingly, the term is often synonymous for the so-called "smiley Unicode characters? (Unicode block smileys), as used here in TheFruitAndFlowerBasket in the comments. Here is actually the term emoji correct, to whose meaning we now come.
Emoticons become emojis
In the early 1990s, the Japanese Shigetaka Kurita works as a developer at NTT DoCoMo, the largest mobile operator in Japan. He comes up with the idea that in short messages with a limited number of characters the use of simple icons could improve the communication possibilities. A stroke of genius and the birth of the emojis.
An emoji is a so-called? Ideogram? (Pictorial sign) with which complex feelings and sensitivities can be visualized. In a real conversation, about 70 percent of people pay attention to the body language of their counterpart, that is, much more than what is literally said. Emojis can balance the physical absence of the conversation partner in the digital conversation (chat, SMS, etc.) a bit.
In October 2010, emojis were included in the Unicode catalog to enable internationally uniform encoding of the glyphs. Each emoji is associated with a code of letters and numbers that is recognized by computers worldwide and translated into an emoji? becomes. You will find the Unicodes of all internationally recognized emojis in the collection of the //emojipedia.org/ database sorted by categories. For this, the correct meaning is explained and suggested to related emojis.
An example: The Emoji? Pile of Poo? ? According to emojipedia, it is one of the world's most popular and should be known to most of you (but, I've already seen it here in various comments). The Unicode of the (literally translated) "bag pile? is U + 1F4A9. It gets really interesting, if you look at the "Pile of Poo? allegedly related emojis. The ? is still understandable, but at? (Soft ice cream) I came to pondering. ?
Confusion of emotions
As long as the sender uses only the two original emoticons :-) and :-(, the message transmitted to them is easy to interpret for the recipient, which becomes difficult when emojis are used with an unclear meaning, or when the sender and receiver of a The Emoji "Face With Steam From Nose" with the Unicode U + 1F624 looks like this:? And stands for triumph in the Asian region, but in the Western world it is used as an expression of anger.
Also the emoji?Flushed Face? often causes confusion. It has the Unicode U + 1F633, is supposed to symbolize embarrassment and looks like this in my writing program:
What can be interpreted correctly here in MS-Word with a little imagination, turns into the Apple iPhone in a face of incredulous amazement:
at Google Will it? s the amused ghost:
Microsoft seems a little unbelieving:
Samsung make it, well, ahhmm, decide for yourself:
and LG send the emoji directly to bed:
To avoid any confusion in your digital conversation partners, you can look at emojipedia all display variants on the various operating systems.
I hope this little excursion into the background of the new? World language? (Original sound?star?) liked you and say:? of the ?? !
