Post 5: Emoticons & Emojis

     A very interesting technology that I learned the history of recently is emojis and emoticons. I have never really thought about the history of these very simple but expressive little picture's, but I suppose they have got to start somewhere. More specifically, there were first created by Carnegie Mellon Professor Scott Fahlman in 1982. The first ever emoji was a small and sideways smile that looked like this, ":-)". Fahlman begin using these characters that resembled a smile in order to lighted to mood of some messages he want sending. He chose those characters as a way to add some personally to his writing. A few years later, in 1997, Japanese phones began to popularize the usage of emojis to express emotions over text. More and more emoticons we being created, leading to more creativity when it came to messaging friends and family. In 2010, the giant technology company, Apple, implemented emojis into their phones. After this, the popularity of emojis skyrocketed. Everybody who had a iPhone was always spamming emojis with their messages, as it was a fun and relatively new concept. More and more people began using them as time went on. Now, there are hundreds of emojis to choose from. This makes it so an emoji can be added to nearly any text message that is sent nowadays. There are many pros and cons of using emojis. An example of a positive aspect is that it can help people convey feelings and opinions in their messages much more efficiently. For example, I can just put a smiley face instead of having to type out a sentence reacting to a friends joke. On the negative side, the can be overused to the point that they start to lose their effectiveness. They also can sometimes be hard to understand. For example, the crying emoji can be used to express sadness, but people also use it for when you start crying because of too much laughter. When the sane emoji has multiple meanings, it can sometimes be difficult to understand the true message. 

To conclude, my favorite emoji is probably the guy saluting. I use it whenever I agree with somebody, or when we decide on a plan of action. I also really like the laughing emoji, as I add it to the majority of text messages I send on a daily basis.