When was the first emoticon created

Perhaps it should even have been a winky smiley face ;. Why would anyone care about a smiley face in a poem from the 17th century?

For me, it's like a wormhole that connects our time with theirs. If you'd been alive in , you might have considered that a colon and a parenthesis form a smiley face. Then things got really creative when people with apparently too much time on their hands created emoticons that looked like Abraham Lincoln and Santa Claus. Of course, there are those who argue that these so-called emoticons were used far before Scott created them in After all, he considers it a fairly simple and obvious idea.

Maybe teletype operators used them back in the day. But when the smiley face turned into a full-blown phenomenon, he knew he had to seriously look for it. The proof was in the post. That brings us to today. And the original emoticons? Nevertheless, he created something most everyone can say has become a part of their modern-day communicative life—whether in emails, text messages, or even handwritten letters. The emoticons evolved into a culture all their own, spawning animated renditions, and replacing written words.

Nonetheless, Kurita maintains a positive view on emoji's impact: " They are used to enhance digital communication, which is centered on the mobile phone.

Because human communication does not just take place digitally, I don't really think that emoji can harm it. The most popular emoji, on Twitter at least, is the so-called "face with tears of joy," which has appeared in over 2 billion tweets since a website called Emojitracker started monitoring them in As for Kurita's favorite?

I do not dislike any of the emoji. Other emoji that I would have liked to have created? The poop emoji, but at the time Transformed into abstraction. Standards Manual has carved a niche among design enthusiast by publishing faithfully reproduced classics from graphic design history, such as Massimo Vignelli's MTA guidelines and NASA's graphic design manual from Kurita had to be increasingly decisive with every pixel that was placed, and further to that, his team was making all the calls -- there weren't focus groups or testing to dictate what they produced.

They're only really legible at actual size, which is very small and meant for a phone screen. Take it from Harvard linguist Steven Pinker. Emoji "happen to have not become entrenched yet, but as with many of our punctuation symbols, like a question mark or an exclamation point, they are there to convey some communicative force that would not be obvious just from the arrangement of words on the page ," he told us in an interview.

Without smileys and hearts and sad faces, communication in wouldn't just be starved for emotion. It would be very, very Public Domain. Follow Tech Insider on Facebook and Twitter. For you. World globe An icon of the world globe, indicating different international options. Get the Insider App. Click here to learn more.