When Did the Web Get Cute?

Although we are not quite sure the exact moment it happened we do know it happened. It was no longer sufficient to just send an email, instant message or pretty much any type of communication involved with the computer, there had to be more. You no longer just typed “Hi” you needed to say it with more feeling and expression and yet, how the heck are you supposed to show emotions on a written correspondence?

Well, on letters people used to write xoxoxo to show hugs and kisses, some would even dot their I’s with a heart. Or what about on the back of an envelope you were sending to someone special and you would write SWAK (sealed with a kiss) or something similar. Ok, so you could type those things on a computer or send text messages with that included, but it still wasn’t enough.

Even as far back as 1969 this was on someone’s mind, in fact it was author Vladimir Nabokov that told an interviewer that there should be some kind of typographical sign to represent a smile, perhaps a concave mark, a supine bracket. And now, many decades later there is a symbol like he envisioned and it would be pretty hard to find anyone that hasn’t seen it. Pretty interesting, isn’t it?

These are emotive icons (or emoticons), which is the arrangement of symbols and letters that are inserted into emails, message boards and instant messaging since the beginning days of the Internet. These fledgling days do not refer to the mid 1990’s when people were starting to see what AOL was, it was the early 1980’s when actually being online was pretty much limited to defense contractors and perhaps by universities research departments.

But, as with everything, the Internet kept growing and now typing is only one way that people communicate on the Internet partially due to the onset of great new technologies promoting more graphic representations of tone, moods and inference it is likely that there will be more frowns and grins in the emoticon’s future.

This phenomenon is turning 26 this year and in web years that is a dinosaur. The inventor has been reported as saying that no one ever guessed that it would have caught on like it did, originally it spread to other universities and after that it began trickle from place to place. Essentially, both the emoticon and smiley have proliferated right along with the World Wide Web.