More than just face value to understanding emoticon effect

OPINION other facial emoticons out there portraying sadness, anger, frustration, exhaustion, puzzlement, disappointment, surprise and misery. There’s no end to them. Many people find it hard to express their feelings and emotions in words but they find emoticons effectively do the trick.

More than that, at least seven scientific studies show emoticons can enhance our online communication, can increase our social intimacy, make us appear friendlier and more perceptive, can grow our popularity and make us happier offline.

More than 10,000 emoticons have been invented by different interest groups. They depict hand gestures, common objects, hearts and peace symbols, types of weather, animals, music, cars, sports, politics, food and fashion.

There are military smiley faces with rocket launchers, smiley face jeep drivers, smiley faces saluting and not-so-smiley faces shot in the head. There are werewolves, scary spiders, dancing bananas and the third-finger gesture.

Emoticons have taken some curious turns. The Bible, for example, has been translated into emoticons. God is represented as a smiley face with a halo.

Seventy-four per cent of Americans use some kind of emoticon every day, but a bigger percentage of Japanese use their distinctive glyphs. Islamists have developed their own world of emoticons.

Dr Owen Churches, of Flinders University in Adelaide, has scanned brain function for years.

He argues that emoticon faces are changing our brains, that we respond more differently to faces than we do to other kinds of objects. We pay more attention to them than we do to anything else. Churches thinks emoticons are a new form of language and to decode that language we have produced new patterns of brain activity.

Earlier this month a conference, Emojicon, was held in San Francisco.

The three-day event attracted vast numbers of designers, entrepreneurs, IT specialists, nerds and the curious, all comparing notes and discussing the future of emoticons. They suggested a raft of new symbols, including many new scientific emoticons.

Although these are already widely used, designers at the conference came up with many more, such as a DNA molecule, new emoticons for all the planets, safety goggles, and a petri dish.

Emoticons do not just appear out of the blue on your computer or ipad. Each must be officially overseen, standardised and approved by an international Unicode Consortium (with representatives from Google, Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, etc.) before they are added to the world’s official list. About 70 new emoticons are added to the official list in most years.

New emoticons invented at the San Francisco conference have been submitted to the Unicode Consortium.

Those approved could show up as dingbats on your computer over the next year or so.