Hai Everyone,
the following article that appeared in The Hindu's
Opinion page on 19th sep. is very interesting!!
Sentiment on the computer screen: saying it with
emoticons
Carnegie Mellon University, from where it
spread, celebrates 25th
anniversary of the smiley face today
For sentiments that would be difficult to convey
Have become integral to personal exchanges
PITTSBURGH: It was a serious contribution to the
electronic lexicon.
:-)
Twenty-five years ago, Carnegie Mellon
University Professor Scott E.
Fahlman says, he was the first to use three
keystrokes a colon followed
by a hyphen and a parenthesis as a horizontal
smiley face in a
computer message.
To mark the anniversary on Wednesday, Professor
Fahlman and colleagues are
starting a student contest for innovation in
technology-assisted,
person-to-person communication. The Smiley
Award, sponsored by Yahoo,
carries a $500 cash prize.
Language experts say the smiley face and other
emotional icons, known as
emoticons, have given people a concise way in
e-mail and other electronic
messages of expressing sentiments that otherwise
would be difficult to
convey.
Professor Fahlman posted the emoticon in a
message to an online electronic
bulletin board at 11-44 a.m. on September 19,
1982, during a discussion
about the limits of online humour and how to
denote comments meant to be
taken lightly.
I propose the following character sequence for
joke markers: :-), he
wrote. Read it sideways.
The suggestion gave computer users a way to
convey humour or positive
feelings with a smile or the opposite
sentiments by reversing the
parenthesis to form a frown.
Carnegie Mellon said Professor Fahlmans smileys
spread from its campus to
other universities, then businesses and
eventually around the world as the
Internet gained popularity.
Ive never seen any hard evidence that the :-)
sequence was in use before
my original post, and Ive never run into anyone
who actually claims to
have invented it before I did, Professor
Fahlman wrote on the
universitys Web page dedicated to the smiley
face. But its always
possible that someone else had the same idea
its a simple and obvious
idea, after all.
Variations, such as the wink that uses a
semicolon, emerged later. And
today people can hardly imagine using computer
chat programs that do not
translate keystrokes into colourful graphics,
said Ryan Stansifer, a
computer science Professor at the Florida
Institute of Technology. Now we
have so much power, we dont settle for a
colon-dash-paren, he said. You
want the smiley face, so all these chatting
softwares have to have them.
It has been fascinating to watch this
phenomenon grow from a little
message I tossed off in 10 minutes to something
that has spread all around
the world, Professor Fahlman was quoted as
saying in a university
statement. I sometimes wonder how many millions
of people have typed
these characters, and how many have turned their
heads to one side to view
a smiley, in the 25 years since this all
started.
Amy Weinberg, a University of Maryland linguist
and computer scientist,
said emoticons such as the smiley were
definitely creeping into the way,
both in business and academia, people
communicate. She added: In terms
of things that language processing does, you
have to take them into
account. If youre doing almost anything... and
you have a sentence that
says I love my boss and then theres a smiley
face, you better not take
that seriously.
Emoticons reflect the likely original purpose of
language to enable
people to express emotion, said Clifford Nass, a
Professor of
communications at Stanford University. The
emotion behind a written
sentence may be hard to discern because emotion
is often conveyed through
tone of voice, he said.
What emoticons do is essentially provide a
mechanism to transmit emotion
when you dont have the voice, he said. In some
ways they give people
the ability not to think as hard about the
words theyre using. AP
____________________________________________________________________________________
Be a better Heartthrob. Get better relationship answers from someone who knows.
Yahoo! Answers - Check it out.
http://answers.yahoo.com/dir/?link=list&sid=396545433
To unsubscribe send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the subject unsubscribe.
To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please
visit the list home page at
http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in
