Tag: EMOTICON

Artist Julius von Bismarck has installed a massive, dynamic emoticon on top of a lighthouse as part of the Provinz exhibition currently on view in Linz, Austria. As part of his work 'Feel-o-Meter,' a clutch of cameras records the facial expressions of passersby, and, with the aid of computer software, determines whether or not most of them are smiling. That collective emotion is then translated ...

Share The smiley emoticon, as we've already made clear, is perhaps the most annoyingly ambiguous glyph in our entire digital lexicon. Whether it pops up in texts, e-mails, or IMs, the smiley forces us to go digging for contextual clues that might tell us whether or not the person on the other side was really smiling, or if there was some ulterior, passive aggressive subtext at work. Well, now ...

They're everywhere. The entire landscape of the digital age is just crawling with them. Like Volkswagen-sized subway rats or hipsters clad in plaid, smileys are so universally ubiquitous that you hardly notice them anymore. But how much is too much? At what point do we assert our evolutionary claim to language, slam our fists on our keyboards, and scream "Enough is enough!"? Is it time that we ...

Young technophiles may believe that catchy abbreviations, acronyms, and emoticons are new developments, arising because of the character limitations of certain modern means of communication like text messaging and tweeting. But the satirical newspaper 'Puck' actually published the first documented emoticons in 1881, and Abraham Lincoln may have even used one when writing a speech. A joint ...