RP215 Making Faces

 RP215 Making Faces

Emoticons are arrangements of keyboard symbols that describe writers' moods. They were invented in the United States in 1982, when researcher Scott Fahlman noticed that his colleagues sometimes took sarcastic bulletin board messages seriously. To solve this problem, he created two simple faces using punctuation marks: :-) and :-( When looked at sideways, these seemingly random combinations resemble a happy face and an unhappy one.

But do emoticons mean the same things to everyone? Fahlman is American, and his emoticons reflect the way Americans show emotion. Different cultures, however, vary widely in terms of facial expression, even down to which features are focused on. For example, how do you express happiness with an emoticon? In the West, it's :-) . The emphasis is on the mouth, because smiling means happiness. If you live in East Asia, however, you're more likely to use something like (^_^), with an emphasis on the eyes. Studies have shown that East Asians look more at someone's eyes to detect emoticons than they do the rest of his or her face. The Western emoticon for surprise is >-o, with raised eyebrows and an open mouth but the same eyes as the happiness emoticon. "Surprise" in East Asia? (*-*)。

Enter emojis, whose name has nothing to do with emotions but rather comes from the Japanese words e (picture) and moji (character). First introduced on Japanese cell phones in the late 1990s, these little pictures are clear enough to be understood anywhere. Happiness? 😊:) . Unhappiness? 😒:(. Easy, isn't it? Maybe a little too easy, in fact. Unlike emoticons, which are created with a keyboard, emojis can represent almost anything. Having begun with a few facial expressions, the emoji "vocabulary" now includes animals, hand gestures, food, drinks, musical instruments, weather, and even logos. No wonder there are whole websites explaining what they all mean!

Emoticons reflect our diversity, while emojis remind us how much we share. Both, however, are ways to express what all people feel and need to say.