Verbally Described Meme #71: Origins of Emoji, Emoticons, Stickers, and Smileys (Deep Dive)
A simple goofy smiley is the direct result of a long mematic evolutionary chain with surprising origins.
Transcript:
An image macro containing a 3d illustrated smiley emoticon and text at the top and bottom. While the smiley is the typical yellow circle of emoji or emoticon, it has eyebrows, micky mouse ears, gloved hands, pink squinty eyes, pursed rose lips, a mouse nose, and teeth. This detail gives it more variety than the unicode emojis and is more akin to the custom illustrated smiley faces rather than text based emoticons or character based stickers.
The text at the top and bottom reads "People who love reuben sandwiches are like Ayyyyyyy lemme get the reuben crying laughing face emoji sandwich emoji. This smiley was originally posted on July 13th 2018 on the Turkish blog, Nisan Forum by the user DEN!Z. However, several of the smileys posted in the same forum post have previously been posted on The largest blogging service in Russia, Live Internet, by user Margaret60 in 2011. Margaret60 however does not have a post containing the titular image and it seems to not be found anywhere else on the web, so authorship of this smiley is questionable at best.
Smileys, as emojis and stickers, find their roots in emoticons. The word emoticon or emote is a portmanteau that combines the words emotion and icon. Typically emoticons are text based representations and emojis are pictures that are now contained with in unicode text, an IT standard for the consistent encoding of text in the world's digital writing systems. Emoji comes from the Japanese words e (which means picture) and moji which means character.
Modern emojis and even now animojis are derivative work of the same emoticon root however have a different mematic evolutionary chain. One other branch worth mentioning in this evolutionary chain would be stickers, which are detailed illustrations of characters that represent an emotion or action that are typically a combination of cartoon illustration and emotions. Stickers were first used in the Korean messaging service, Line, and are widely used in services like Facebook messenger today. While the earliest emojis are to be found in the 1997 J-Phone, the earliest confirmed emoticons can be found in the March 30th 1881 issue of the United States satirical magazine, Puck. They are described originally as Typographical art, rather than the juxtaposition of ASCII characters to represent emotion. There is an unconfirmed usage of an emoticon in a transcript of a speech of Abraham Lincoln in the New York Times in 1862, however this remains up for debate if it was intentional or a typo. There are other instances of similar debatable usages of a color before an end parentheses dating back to 1648.
Smileys come into vogue outside of the digital realm as smiley faces. The first yellow circle with black dots and an arc representing a mouth was designed by Harvey Ball in 1963 who "was commissioned by the State Mutual Life Assurance Company to create an image to boost staff morale" and was paid $45. This drawing was then turned into a button which started a craze for the image. After being gobbled up by consumerism and being embattled in legal disputes on the ownership of the iconic image, in 2001 Charlie Ball, Harvey's son sought to liberate the image by founding the World Smile Foundation in an effort to realign the image with the intention of making a positive difference in the world.
While it is claimed that the first emoticon smiley was created by Scott Fahlman in 1982, there is some contention as there's a description of a "tongue-in-cheek" emoticon in a Reader's Digest article in 1967 and a text based description in a New York Times interview in 1969 where Vladimir Nabokov noted " I often think there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile, some sort of concave mark, a supline round bracket. But truly the first smileys existed within the PLATO IV computer system in 1972, and were widely used by the userbase.
In the advent of the internet reaching an increased portion of the world, emoticons rapidly developed and expanded beyond the simple two or three character smiley face into an entire shared language widely used on chat services like AIM and blogs like 2channel and 4chan. The variant of the smiley we see in the original meme owes it's existence to this long and extensive evolutionary chain, which for the smiley has largely gone cold while stickers, emoji, and now twitch emotes are flourishing.
Links:
https://twitter.com/httptaengod/statu...
https://www.liveinternet.ru/users/mar...
liveinternet.ru/users/margaret60/profile/
https://www.nisanforum.com/konu/sevim...
https://www.flickr.com/photos/preside...