Happy birthday "smiley"!

Yesterday, Smiley celebrated its 25th anniversary! It was on September 19, 1982 that the happy face, composed of a bracket (smile), colon (eyes) and a dash for a nose, was first invented and put into use by the Carnegie Mellon University research professor Scott Fahlman. Since Smiley's first introduction into the virtual realm, numerous variations of the "happy" theme have been elaborated. The so called emoticons, now also comprising a sad, crying, confused and many other versions of Smiley, constitute traslations of human emotions into combinations of characters and numerical signs, which have now turned into an integral part of the vocabulary of the chat room, the text message and the email.

 The need to give a most realistic representation of human emotions have resulted in the subsequent expansion of the series of faces and the creation of animated emoticons.They all testify for the attempt to augment the expressive possibilities of the internet user, who approaches the net not only as field of information but also as one of communication. Emoticons betray an impulse to "humanize" and make less abstract the virtual space.