A Brief History of Emotion Icons

Emotion icons have become ubiquitous in internet communications as a way to convey emotion in text based conversations.

Emotion icons help to indicate subtle cues that are conveyed via tone of voice or facial expression during normal conversation.

Since the vast majority of internet communication is text based, emotion icons serve to fill the gap and help avoid misunderstandings that can occur when proper contextual information is not conveyed.

Emotion icons were first used in either the late seventies or early eighties, depending on who you ask.  The very early days of the internet were almost entirely based on ASCII text, and early users noted very quickly that a number of misunderstandings were occurring because of the lack of contextual information.  Emotion icons were clearly needed to alert the recipient whether the message should be considered tongue in cheek, or if the message was to be taken seriously. 

The first emotion icons to be used in common conversation are still the two most commonly used today.  The stereotypical "smiley" emotion icons (both with and without the nose) were created using a colon for the eyes, a dash for the nose, and an open parenthesis for the smiling mouth.  These emotion icons were used to convey humor and indicate that the statement is not to be taken literally.  Likewise, by using the same symbols but replacing the open parenthesis with the close parenthesis, it was possible to create emotion icons that displayed a frowning face.  The dash could be omitted to make the emotion icons more concise.

Modern emotion icons actually replace the ASCII text string with a corresponding image.  For example, the aforementioned smiling and frowning face emotion icons are replaced by messaging software to show and actual smiling or frowning face.  Other, more complicated, emotion icons are used and the type available, as well as their ASCII text mappings, vary from messenger to messenger.