Emoticons

♠
Emoticons, the smiling, winking and frowning faces that inhabit the computer keyboard, have not only hung around long past their youth faddishness of the 1990s, but they have grown up. Twenty-five years after they were invented as a form of computer-geek shorthand, emoticons — an open-source form of pop art that has evolved into a quasi-accepted form of punctuation — are now ubiquitous.

-- Alex Williams for The New York Times

I remember when I first came into the blogosphere. I would see these strange 'punctuation marks' in the comments and would simply be at a loss, and I just tended to ignore them, thinking at best that they suggested an emphasis of some kind (reading the Ds and Ps as Damn! and Please!). Then, when I finally caught on, I was inclined not to indulge, thinking that they were really young and just not right for me. But I have grown fond of them.

( article )

xXx

Emoticons

♠
Emoticons, the smiling, winking and frowning faces that inhabit the computer keyboard, have not only hung around long past their youth faddishness of the 1990s, but they have grown up. Twenty-five years after they were invented as a form of computer-geek shorthand, emoticons — an open-source form of pop art that has evolved into a quasi-accepted form of punctuation — are now ubiquitous.

-- Alex Williams for The New York Times

I remember when I first came into the blogosphere. I would see these strange 'punctuation marks' in the comments and would simply be at a loss, and I just tended to ignore them, thinking at best that they suggested an emphasis of some kind (reading the Ds and Ps as Damn! and Please!). Then, when I finally caught on, I was inclined not to indulge, thinking that they were really young and just not right for me. But I have grown fond of them.

( article )

xXx