If you are on the
far side of seventy, as I am, you may not even know what emoticons and Emojis
are, but trust me, your grandchildren do.
Emoticons--those little smiley face icons used to show various emotions,
and their descendants, Emojis-- icons illustrating almost anything, from Santa
Claus to a screaming cat to a pile of excrement-- have become so popular with
young people who communicate by texting and e-mailing, that some Emoji experts converse only through
pictographs. You don’t need to know the
other person’s foreign language—or even how to read!
But a number of us
older folks, including academics, are more than a little worried about what the popularity of
communicating with pictographs is doing
to our language and literature.
The first
emoticon was created in 1982 by Scott E.
Fahlman, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University. Pretty much no one
had a personal computer or access to the internet except for geeky scientists
and scholarly computer experts who communicated with each other on the earliest
on-line bulletin boards. They wanted a
way to mark posts that were not meant to be taken seriously, to avoid frequent
fire storms from people who didn’t get the joke. At 11:44 a.m. on Sept. 19,
1982, Fahlman hit three keys on his keyboard: a colon, a hyphen and a parenthesis—and
the emoticon was born –a sideways happy face. He wrote: “I propose the
following character sequence for joke markers
: - )
Fahlman never
thought to trademark the Smiley emoticon, and never made a cent from it. He maintains a sense of humor about his fame
as the Father of the Emoticon: “It’s weird, though,” he says, “to think what
the first line of my obituary will be.”
Clearly there was
a need for a way of adding emotional resonance to the dry words sent by e-mail,
text, i-chat, etc. Computer programs
competed to provide the most, best Smiley emoticons. Plain text emotions turned
into animated colored images.
While the Smiley
emoticon is beloved by texting teenagers, there are many adults out there who
become enraged at the sight of that smiling yellow face. “I am deeply offended
by them.” Maria McErlane, a British journalist, actress and radio personality
told The New York Times in 2011. “If
anybody on Facebook sends me a message with a little smiley-frowny face…I will
de-friend them...I find it lazy. Are
your words not enough?”
Despite the dislike
of many intellectuals, it seems that nearly everyone who texts uses the Smiley
emoticon. In 2007, Yahoo! surveyed
40,000 Yahoo Messenger users and found that 82% of them used emoticons in their
IM conversations; 83 per cent said that “happiness” and “flirting” are the two
emotions they express most with emoticons. Fifty-seven per cent said that they
would rather tell a “crush” their true feelings with emoticons than words.
Emojis are the next generation of
emoticons—images that represent emotions and just about everything else, while
emoticons are always about emotions and express them with a face. Emojis are not just Smiley faces but also
flags of various countries, musical notes, people, an engagement ring, the Statue
of Liberty, a camel, a baby bottle, a green dragon, a butcher knife, a cat
making the “Scream” face, even a stack of dollar bills with wings and a pyramid
of excrement with eyes and a grin.
Named for a Japanese word
that means “picture” plus “letter”
(moji.) Emojis began in Japan and the
pictographs often are very specific to that country, such as men bowing in
apology or a white flower meaning “brilliant homework”. According to Business Wire, more than seventy per cent of young women in Japan
use “Emoji-enabled services” and the Emoji market there exceeds $300 million.
What do you DO with Emojis?
You use them (especially if you’re female and young) to jazz up your e-mail or
text messages. Twenty-something Hannah Goldfield wrote in October 12, 2012, in
a New Yorker essay called “I Heart
Emoji”:
“As
with so many technological tools, texting has far surpassed its original,
utilitarian purpose to become, for many, not only the primary form of pragmatic
communication…but also an art form...Last month, with the introduction of the
iPhone 5 and iOS6, texters got… a set of brand new Emojis. As one aficionado recently put It, ’It’s like
you’re a speaker of some primitive Japanese picture language with only three
hundred some odd words and your vocabulary just DOUBLED.”
Another, presumably young
female, (she calls herself “Hot Piece” and writes for a blog called “Total
Sorority Move”) reacted to the same news:
“WAIT A SECOND! There are NEW
EMOJIS for iOS6 and I can’t even begin to explain my excitement …There’s a
family and a bride, which I’ll never use except wishfully, and gay and lesbian
couples…And there is a tongue. Emoji
sexting is going to be a thing.”
Emojis are so trendy that
they were discussed in the January 13, 2013 episode of HBO’s Girls, when no one could understand
Shoshanna’s Emoji of a panda next to a gun next to a wrapped gift.
The best known Emoji artist
in the U.S. is data engineer and NYU teacher Fred Benenson who, in 2009, when
he was 29, raised over $3,500 on Kickstarter to fund his translation of Moby Dick into Emojis—titled “Emoji Dick”, of course. He hired helpers through Amazon Mechanical
Turks and translated the 200,000-word epic completely into pictures. In February of 2013, the Library of Congress
welcomed it as the first ever Emoji book in its collection.
Here’s the first sentence, “Call
me Ishmael”
Emoticons and Emojis are a
language of pictures that is universally understood, so it surmounts language
barriers, sort of like communicating with aliens in a science fiction film by
mental telepathy. If the popularity of
emoticons and Emojis continues to grow, and if more classic books like Moby Dick are translated into
pictographs, what does that bode for the future of language and the subtleties,
skills and eloquence of writers, poets and journalists?
I’d have to agree with the
opinion of one Ben Smithurst, who writes for Harsh Critic and reacted to an article written by Emoji Dick translator Benenson in Jan.
2013’s Esquire Magazine called “How
to Use Emoji for Men.” Smithurst’s
rejoinder was called “Emoji: Has Esquire
Lost its Mind?” He summed up the subject with an illustration of an Egyptian
goddess sitting in front of hieroglyphics and the sentence: “Basically, after
5000 years of technological progress, we’ve returned to eking approximate
meaning from pictograms.”
##
This post is
excerpted from my forthcoming book “The Saga of Smiley, How a Cheerful Icon
Changed the World”.
