The smiley was meant to underline whether the sender is joking or if he is serious.
The use of emoticons became more common with mobile phones. PDO
The professor who developed the smiley Scott Fahlman sent the first official emoticon on September 19, 1982, which he proposed to be used to underline the sender’s emotional state.
Fahlman advised to read the signs sideways. 🙂 would mean the sender is joking and 🙁 messages where the sender is serious. This is how emoticons were born, which in turn led to emojis, which today can be used to have conversations without using any letters at all.
Below you can see the first email message in which emoticons were used, translated.
19.9.82 11:44 – 🙂
Posted by Scott E Fahlman
I suggest the following string to describe the joke:
🙂
Read it sideways. In fact, it’s probably more economical to label things that are NOT jokes given current trends. Use for this
🙁
Fahlman doesn’t like the emojis that have become common along with emoticons.
– I think they are ugly. Maybe it’s because I haven’t invented them. I’m kind of attached to the original emojis, Fahlman said in 2015 For Digiday.
– If people like emojis, great, but I don’t.
Fahlman does not see himself as the original inventor of emoticons, although his signs were a precursor to emojis.
– In a way, the emojis are descended from what I developed. But if you ask me, the first emoticon was an exclamation point because it was a sign that conveyed an emotion without writing it out.
Conveying feelings in messages with pictures and drawings is by no means new. History magazine tells how the Danish author Johannes V. Jensen wrote the publisher of the letter in December 1900 To Erns Bojesenwhere he used a boring weather and travel theme to liven up happy and sad faces that resemble emoticons.