Smiley anniversary — 42 years since emotions entered the Internet

Today, September 19, marks the birthday of the emoji. On this day in 1982, Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott Fahlman proposed using ";-)" to indicate a joke and ";-)" for serious messages in online correspondence. This small idea gave birth to a new "punctuation of emotions," which quickly spread throughout the early networks.

Novyny.LIVE will tell you about the history of emotions on the internet.

From ASCII emoticons to emojis

The first "faces" of the Internet were text emoticons made of punctuation marks: :-) ;-) :-O and others.

At the same time, back in 1963, Harvey Ball's iconic yellow "smiley face" appeared — a graphic symbol created to lift the corporate mood. It later became a massive pop culture icon, but was not directly related to digital chats.

In 1999, Japanese designer Shigetaka Kurita developed the first set of 176 pixel emojis for NTT DoCoMo's i-mode mobile platform, which marked the beginning of the modern "ecosystem" of smartphone icons. The MoMA (Museum of Modern Art) keeps the set as an art object.

Standardization took place in 2010, when hundreds of emojis were officially added to Unicode 6.0, and a year later Apple enabled the global emoji keyboard in iOS 5, making the icons massive outside of Japan.

How differently do gen z and millennials use emojis?

Studies show that the interpretation of emojis changes significantly from generation to generation. For example, 🙂 is more likely to be read by younger users as a passive-aggressive or ironic "smile," while older users take it literally. Similarly, 👍 sounds a bit harsh for some of Generation Z, and instead of 😂 ("face with tears of joy"), Zoomers often use 💀 ("I died laughing").

For millennials, the 😂 emoticon means joy, and 😭 means sadness. For Zoomers, it's different: they put sarcasm and irony into the emoji. So, 💀 — "I died laughing" is the same as 😂 for millennials.

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