':-)' Marks 40th Anniversary of the World's First Emoticon Appearance

Professor Scott Fahlman of the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University, USA

[Asia Economy Reporter Jeong Hyunjin] ':-)' On September 19, 1982, at 11:44 a.m., Scott Fahlman, a professor in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University in the United States, posted a message on the university bulletin board combining a colon (:), hyphen (-), and parenthesis ()) characters. Although now commonly used to represent a smiling face, this was the moment the emoticon, which did not exist at the time, was born. The Guinness Book of Records named it the "first digital emoticon."

It has been 40 years since the world's first emoticon appeared online, CNN and other U.S. media reported on the 19th (local time). Professor Fahlman recalled the time when he first used this emoticon, stating that it was intended to solve the problem of conveying jokes online, which internet users still struggle with today.

Professor Fahlman told CNN Business, "If someone among the people reading an online post does not understand the joke and reacts with anger and hostility, the original atmosphere of discussion can disappear, leaving only conflict." He added, "In the era when only text-based internet media was used, it was impossible to discern gestures or facial expressions, so it was difficult to tell whether something was a joke just from the sentence."

Since then, emoticons quickly spread beyond the Carnegie Mellon bulletin board over the past 40 years. They evolved into emoji, pictorial icons representing expressions or objects, playing an important role in all forms of communication both online and offline.

Jennifer Daniel, chair of the Emoji Subcommittee under the Unicode Consortium, a nonprofit organization overseeing emoji standardization, explained that emoticons provide "things that language does not say, like gestures, intonation, or volume. They clarify what people mean when they say 'okay.'"

Professor Fahlman is now an emeritus professor at Carnegie Mellon University, researching artificial intelligence (AI) and related applications. However, he also gives lectures worldwide about the first development of emoticons. He said, "No matter what achievements I make in the AI field, the first line of my obituary will be about this."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.