This week, the emoticon turned 25, which is kind of bizarre to me. I mean, Professor Fahlman, are you trying to tell me that the horizontal smiley face is older than the Apple Lisa, the original Windows OS, and the person writing this blog?

In any case, it's interesting to think about how emoticons have changed the way we communicate online. Without a "smiley" at the end of some of my chat dialogs, I would come across as a real B, I'm sure. Plus where would online sarcasm be without a little *wink* ;) here and there? Emoticons truly represent us when our facial expressions cannot online. I don't think there will ever be a replacement to person-to-person contact, but these little guys aide the possibility.

It's also pretty amazing to see how many emoticons there are available in most chat clients. I use Trillian, and there are like hundreds of them, some not even being in smiley form. Those come in handy especially for those instances when I need to send someone a car icon for no real reason in the middle of a chat...which happens never. The new emoticons have become quite fanciful, barring unnecessarily ridiculous, but I still very much appreciate the original smileys. Those almost never get lost in chat client translation [whereas an angel icon turns into a collection of symbols like 0;-}<], and also transfer my feelings on the web.



In an anthropological sense, seeing that even back in the 80s the conveying of emotions was a valid concern reveals the birth of social networking today. That is, the need to identify a person behind the screen. A human behind the machine, sharing and interacting all in real time. Chatting without colon-dash-end parentheses would be rather boring and dry. Additionally, there would be no such thing as an emoticon war. Wait...we all do that, right?

The emoticon: representing the human condition on the internets since 1982. Happy birthday, dear friend <3. Oh, and that "less than three" is a heart, for the laymen.