UX nerd

Emoticons were officially born on 19 September, 1982, when Scott Fahlman suggested that people use :-) to distinguish jokes from literal messages on a message board at Carnegie Mellon. Since then, people did a lot of research on the impact of emoticons assuming that emoticons are the facial expressions of IM, even applications have been developed to help capture facial expressions and turn them into emoticons. However, after spending considerable time reading about it, we couldn’t find a clear origin for the assumption that emoticons are equivalent to facial expressions. On the other hand, there is evidence that emoticons were created as punctuation marks, for which depicted faces acted only mnemonics. So what is it: facial expressions or punctuation marks? And what difference does it make? At first glance, this may seem a rather academic discussion; but you may want to reconsider how important it is to get the gist of emoticons in a world where people are increasingly relying on mediated communication. And if not, think of the efforts the MIT Media Lab is putting into affective computing and news on patents such as the Nokia glow and follow the smart crowds.

In any case, last month, Toon, Dominika, Valentina, Maria and I designed and run an experiment to test if emoticons are actually the facial expressions of IM. Are they used in the same context a real facial expression would be appropriate? Is there a correlation between use of emoticons and real facial expressions produced during an IM conversation? This is how we did it and our results.

Continue reading ‘Emotions and emoticons: are emoticons the facial expressions of IM?’