Each One Teach One: Emoticons :D

The history of emoticons is relatively short, as they were only truly created in the 1980s and popularized in the 1990s, by which the decade later they were mostly replaced by emojis.

However, this does not diminish the importance of emoticons and emojis had online. Even though they were recently created they have drastically shaped our digital and even real world in ways unseen before. One such example is the word of the year of 2015 for oxford dictionaries being the happy crying emoji as shown below.

History

Emoticons came before emojis, and they were originally created in 1982 by Scott Fahlman who "realized the need for a symbol to temper the bickering that plagued online forums." Specifically, Fahlman created the :-) and :-( emoticons.

Before this in 1979, however, Stanford student Kevin Mackenzie realized how by communicating online we lost important conversational features such as "gestures, emotions, and intonations." As a result, Mackenzie created the emoticon -) to be put at the end of "tongue and cheek remarks."

Another person named Ralph Ruppert claims the emoticon -) to have been created by his Aunt Ev in 1967 for the same purpose as Kevin Mackenzie's. So, depending on who you ask the creator of emoticons was either Kevin Mackenzie, Ralph Ruppert, or Scott Fahlman.

That said, some emoticons were found in old historical works in 2014. Such works were one of Lincoln's speeches from 1862 and Robert Herrick's 1648 poem, "To fortune." In these works, the emoticons ;) and :) were used respectively, however it is likely that both of these emoticons were actually not intentional, but instead typos.

Emojis on the other hand were created in 1999 by Japanese Artist Shigetaka Kurita, where he created the original 176 of them, which are now in display at the New York Museum of modern art (as shown).

"Kurita wanted to create an easy-to-understand interface that conveyed information in a simple way rather than having to type out the information fully. For example, using a ☁️ emoji rather than writing out cloudy." says a Wired article. Emojis were also designed to add emotional nuisances to conversations online.

As seen by both emoticons and emojis, they both attempted to combat the issue of the loss of emotional context in online environments where conversations were not had face to face, which would allow for gestures, tone of voice, and etc. to supply this context.

Impact

Both emoticons and emojis have had an impact on our world today, though not as great as other communication technologies in history. Mainly this impact is seen online today where emotions can be expressed through the usage of such characters.

Though not absolutely world changing compared to technologies like the radio or newspaper, emoticons and emojis have shaped our online communication environment to be more inclusive and easier to understand. Having simple flat text being said back and forth allows for numerous misunderstandings, especially if said things were said sarcastically, so the fact that emojis and emoticons exist help solve this problem.

The impact of these two types of symbols and icons can also be seen through how emojis now are on keyboards for practically every phone now-a-days, and emoticons have numerous websites were you can search for specific symbols to use.

To end this post, I think it is important to mention that there is a small negative effect that came around from the usage of emojis and emoticons, however it's more prevalent in emoticons. This is the negativity and obscenity of some icons and symbols, with big examples being the middle finger and sexual symbols.

Not to mention the fact that emojis represent our world but in digital form, so the lack of emojis for something in the real world can also be seen as another negative, for the medium not being inclusive.

That said, emojis are added each year to combat this problem with a recent change being how people can now change emojis with human body parts to specific skin colors, where before there was only one option. This addition may lead to some controversial usages for topics like racism, but overall, it seems like a step in the right direction, especially since these changes were not intended for this usage.