Emoticons. :) :( :? :/ :D are just a few. A few that first appeared in 1979.. 42 years ago, and first used in 1982 from a computer scientist Scott E. Fahlman. It was suggested that :-) could mean something funny or nice while :-( could mean something serious or sad. What needs to be considered here is the media richness theory this is when there are different forms of communication, phone calls, emails/text messages, and face to face meeting. Talking to someone when you can see their face, either in person or via video sharing calls you are able to read their facial expressions and also see their body language (for the more part if via Facetime like calls) however, when it is a conversation over the phone or over any sort of messenger, thats lost. It goes a step further to when only sending messages the tone of the conversation is also lost, bring in emotions. Even the most basic of emoticons can give the reader a sense of tone in the conversation that otherwise would've been missing.
In a study over a six month time frame over 158,000 text messages were collected, of these texts roughly 4% contained at least one emoticon. The study found that, to no surprise in my opinion, females were sending more emoticons overall but the men had more varity of different emotions. What surprised me also was that in a 1998 study that focused on emails they found that 1-25% contained at least one of more emoticons. This is surprising to me because since being in college we are so heavily taught about email ettiquette. It is even an unspoken, yet somewhat spoken, rule to not even send an explanation point in a business email because the reader could think you're yelling at them. While emoticons were a welcomed creation to some, some had their cons with them. Some think that this creation formed a larger sense of laziness because instead of typing how one feels they may just send a quick :), it also can negatively affect the credibility of an author if all the time they're using emoticons in place of describing real emotion. However, we have our pros. The first being its creation, it gives non verbal communication when face to face communication is not currently feasibile. They can also clarify the tone of the current communication without any drawn out explanation.
With new times come some updates, enter emojis. These little guys were first created in the 1990's by a Japanese phone provider and in 2009 came out with 722 released emojis to further emotions through online communication. Not many people study this form of communication, partly because it is new and because of it there are not many studys for it. There was a study done through Twitter to see the affect of emojis across the globe. When looking at over 12 million tweets by close to 8,500 users it was found that 19.6% of tweets shared contain at least one emoji, 45% of those having one all the way to 3% of those containing 5 different emojis. Broken down by country is a very interesting thing as well. Coming in at first is Indonesia having 46.5% of tweets containing an emoji, fifth is Qatar having 32.6%, and at last... the U.S, in the United States 7% of tweets contain an emoji. There is also correlation that when there is a higher life expectacy across the board, the use of emojis decreases, why? Great question, my thought is that these people may be having more real time conversation and aren't looking down to send an emoji but, my thoughts.
The invention of emoticons and progression to emojis I think have changed communication in a good way. People who are unable to communicate real time, or just don't want to, are able to share more accurate feelings through a screen. Sometimes people only have their screen to "talk to" in a sense and this enables anyone to share their feelings, which at the end of the day, is what keeps people as sane as can be, especially during the current times.
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