Synthesis Essay # 1 :-): The Saga Of Emoticon
The Saga of :-)
One colon, one hyphen and one parenthesis——by pressing these three keys on his keyboard, the computer scientist Scott E. Fahlman made the first sideway smiling face in human history, dubbed “emoticon”. Nowadays, six billion of them flooding the Internet on a daily basis, along with their slicker younger sisters, emojis. While demonstrating a rampant and iridescent interplay of symbols, images, and the complexity of human language, these burgeoning modern “hieroglyphics” are bringing profound changes to online communication, the society, and ultimately, the language we are using.
Since emoticon was first coined in 1982 on an online forum, it has revolutionized the way we communicate with each other. It all started with the moment when Fahlman realised his words were failing him —— he found that it was difficult to convey that some posts were meant to be taken as a joke. And he wrote "I propose the following character sequence for joke markers :-)”. The problem with digital-meditated communication has always been the absence of non-verbal information, the hidden social cues as intonation, gesture, facial expressions and body language involved in a face to face conversation, which allow people to converse accurately and precisely. Now emoticons may allow us to re-incorporate it into …show more content…
They have contributed to social intimacy. To understand this, we must first become aware of the fact that humans are actually mimicking each others’ expressions and emotions while talking in person. This is known as emotional contagion, fundamentally how we show empathy and build relationships. Scientific studies have shown that “emoticons provoke activity in our brains which is similar to brain activity registered when we look at a real human face”. Often without knowing, we end up mimicking the emoticon. In this case, social connectedness was strengthened every time those little faces
One colon, one hyphen and one parenthesis——by pressing these three keys on his keyboard, the computer scientist Scott E. Fahlman made the first sideway smiling face in human history, dubbed “emoticon”. Nowadays, six billion of them flooding the Internet on a daily basis, along with their slicker younger sisters, emojis. While demonstrating a rampant and iridescent interplay of symbols, images, and the complexity of human language, these burgeoning modern “hieroglyphics” are bringing profound changes to online communication, the society, and ultimately, the language we are using.
Since emoticon was first coined in 1982 on an online forum, it has revolutionized the way we communicate with each other. It all started with the moment when Fahlman realised his words were failing him —— he found that it was difficult to convey that some posts were meant to be taken as a joke. And he wrote "I propose the following character sequence for joke markers :-)”. The problem with digital-meditated communication has always been the absence of non-verbal information, the hidden social cues as intonation, gesture, facial expressions and body language involved in a face to face conversation, which allow people to converse accurately and precisely. Now emoticons may allow us to re-incorporate it into …show more content…
They have contributed to social intimacy. To understand this, we must first become aware of the fact that humans are actually mimicking each others’ expressions and emotions while talking in person. This is known as emotional contagion, fundamentally how we show empathy and build relationships. Scientific studies have shown that “emoticons provoke activity in our brains which is similar to brain activity registered when we look at a real human face”. Often without knowing, we end up mimicking the emoticon. In this case, social connectedness was strengthened every time those little faces