The word emoticon comes from the English notion emoticon , composed from the term emotion (which translates as "emotion" ) and the word icon (that is, "icon" ). The Royal Spanish Academy ( RAE ) includes the concept as an emoticon .
An emoticon or emoticon is a digital graphic that represents a facial expression with the aim of alluding to a mood . These drawings are used in electronic messages that are sent through email , an instant messaging system, a social network or another platform.
The first emoticons or emoticons, created using a series of ASCII characters, represented people's faces, usually smiling. As time went by, multiple emoticons emerged with different meanings.
The use of a colon, a hyphen and a closing parenthesis allows you to create the emoticon of a smiling face: 🙂 Depending on the context where the sequence is written, the signs are automatically replaced by an image. If the parenthesis used is an opening parenthesis, the face that is drawn reflects sadness: 🙁
In the cases mentioned and in many others, the face created with the signs appears lying down (you must turn your head to the left to see them correctly). However, in Eastern cultures, emoticons are usually created standing up (vertically), with apostrophes as eyes and a dash, slash or other sign as a mouth: "o"
Beyond conveying emotions , an emoticon also serves to abbreviate a message. The sender, instead of writing that he is happy or happy about something, can include a smiling emoticon and in this way he will be communicating his feelings to the recipient.
The effects this has on communication are varied. On the one hand, in an informal context, where language has always been less complex and precise than in a formal one, we should not consider the use of an image instead of a phrase serious: among friends it is common to use gestures instead of words, even to give directions or ask for favors.
However, when the use of emoticons and other features of virtual messaging systems becomes excessive, many times the user takes this reduced way of communicating to other contexts, and thus began the problem that has been worrying linguists for years: children and young people use increasingly poor and incorrect language .
It should be noted that the deterioration that the use of language has suffered in recent years is not due to modern technologies but to the way in which many people use them. If we refer for a moment to the emergence of text messages on mobile telephony, we will understand that at that time the limit of possible characters per message was directly linked to the price of the service itself: if the user exceeded the limit, they had to pay more money . This gave rise to the emergence and massification of many tactics to "compress" language.
As in all compression work, it is necessary to have the knowledge to carry out "decompression", which in the case of a text message is nothing more than the decoding of the terms and expressions that make it up. Two people from the same culture and with similar backgrounds can chat without problems using abbreviations and emoticons that do not appear in the dictionary, but if this way of communicating is taken out of context, communication fails.
Given the popularity of Japanese culture in many parts of the world, which is seen with the success of its cartoon series, comics and video games, its attractive emoticons soon reached Western messages.