Digital ‘smiley face’ turns 25

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Variations, such as the "wink" that uses a semicolon, emerged later. And today people can hardly imagine using computer chat programs that don't translate keystrokes into colorful graphics, said Ryan Stansifer, a computer science professor at the Florida Institute of Technology.

"Now we have so much power, we don't settle for a colon-dash-parenthesis," he said. "You want the smiley face, so all these chatting softwares have to have them."

Instant-messaging programs often contain an array of faces intended to express emotions ranging from surprise to affection to embarrassment.

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"It has been fascinating to watch this phenomenon grow from a little message I tossed off in 10 minutes to something that has spread all around the world," Fahlman was quoted as saying in a university statement.

"I sometimes wonder how many millions of people have typed these characters, and how many have turned their heads to one side to view a smiley, in the 25 years since this all started."

Amy Weinberg, a University of Maryland linguist and computer scientist, said emoticons such as the smiley were "definitely creeping into the way, both in business and academia, people communicate."

"In terms of things that language processing does, you have to take them into account," she said. "If you're doing almost anything ... and you have a sentence that says 'I love my boss' and then there's a smiley face, you better not take that seriously."

Expert explanation
Emoticons reflect the likely original purpose of language — to enable people to express emotion, said Clifford Nass, a professor of communications at Stanford University. The emotion behind a written sentence may be hard to discern because emotion is often conveyed through tone of voice, he said.

"What emoticons do is essentially provide a mechanism to transmit emotion when you don't have the voice," Nass said.

In some ways, he added, they also give people "the ability not to think as hard about the words they're using."

Stansifer said the emoticon was part of a natural progression in communication.

"I don't think the smiley face was the beginning and the end," he said. "All people at all times take advantage of whatever means of communication they have."

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