Everyone who has ever been online is familiar with emoticons. You know, those chubby little smiley faces and other cartoon-like characters that are usually found in e-mails, blog posts, instant messages and other online communication.
The smiley is easily the best known emoticon — think of him as the king of the emoticons. But the smiley is by no means on his own these days; there are now hundreds, or perhaps thousands of animated 3-D emoticons capable of expressing a staggering number of different feelings, activities, moods and states of mind.
While in the old days, you pretty much had to settle for just smiley faces, frowning faces, and a handful of other emotions that could be expressed with simple characters on the keyboard, the new generation of 3-D animated emoticons are capable of communicating pretty much anything!
For example, there are now emoticons that swim, eat, sing, paint, laugh, dive, play basketball, fight, as well as a handful of pornographic ones that do things best unmentioned in this article ;-)
In other words, emoticons don’t just express emotion anymore, as they did in the beginning; they are now capable of communicating activities and much more complicated concepts. Which begs the question: how long will it be before we are able to write a complete e-mail (or blog post) by only using emoticons?
Of course, an e-mail message or blog posts consisting only of emoticons would probably get just as boring as a page full of flat text with no emoticons. The truth is, emoticons like the smiley face are popular because they add spice to our online scribblings. And just like any good spice, too much is as bad as not enough.
There is no denying, however, that emoticons are now more popular than ever, and I suspect that the new breed of 3-D cartoon-like animated smilies are the reason why. For some people, I think they become more like pets than tools to use when communicating online.
But whatever the reason for their popularity may be, there is no denying that the 3-D emoticons are cute, chubby little buggers that are quite addictive to use. In fact, it is downright difficult not to smile (or at least have a half-smirk on your face) when looking at some of these little characters.
And at the end of the day, anything that lightens the mood a bit in our day-to-day e-mails or instant messages is bound to be popular. And as long as they continue doing that, emoticons will probably stick around. :)
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Down with the smiliey. Used too often and too often used poorly I say.
Comment by PG — January 4, 2008 @ 10:00 am