The way we communicate is changing at breakneck speed, in fact, it looks like the wagon that is attached to the engine of technology, which has gone from the useful to the essential and, in some cases, to the tyrant. write again to talk to those who are away or to decorate the exhibition that has become the wall of our profiles on social media. Emoticons exist precisely to save one of the limits of written communication.
What do emoticons do? The most common thing is that they simulate our face, that they accompany a message so that it is understood in the right tone. Hello! (Smiling Face) How are you? (Mine rejoiced)?It’s not the same as, good morning, how are you ??. In fact, emoticons help save the way we communicate in writing because they’re often serious. That’s how we interpret it, what if the escort?It’s not uncommon to think the other person is angry.
- On the other hand.
- If we start writing without emoticons.
- We may feel that the message we are sending may contain complete information.
- But at the same time it does not seem to be as we would like.
You could say that emoticons are indicators of emotion, the first emoticon was in 1982 and the author was the computer engineer Scott Fahlman, the use he has implemented is very similar to the one we use today, since he used them in forums as an indicator to differentiate messages with ironic and cheerful tone from the most serious ones.
Since then, the evolution has been so great that in 2015 the Oxford Dictionary chose an emoji, exactly the one that cries with laughter, as the word of the year, they may have exaggerated a bit with that decision, but it gives us an idea. of how these forms of communication have been naturally integrated into the way we express ourselves.
These are no longer forums, but we, like Scott Fahlman, continue to use the smiley face to brighten the tone of a message, or in response to a funny message, in fact, typical?hahaha? It gets closer and closer to retirement because the emoticon is more real representing our gesture than this succession of letters that we rarely reproduce in reality.
When a new form of communication arises, a new challenge also arises for science: understanding the effects of this form of communication on people. Well, a survey conducted by Yuasa, Saito and Mukawa in 2006 showed that the use of MRIs as a correlate of brain activity participants, that emoticons are not recognized as faces, i. e. right fusiform convolution, which is normally activated in facial recognition, remained inactive in the face of exposure to emoticon.
However, that’s not the problem. The important thing is that we are able to identify each emoticon – at least the most popular – with different emotions. So what these researchers tell us is that they’re doing their job well.
In another survey, Iglesias, Nicholls, Thiessen, Kohler and Keage (2014) came to a different conclusion, stating that faces and emoticons activate the same areas of the brain.
One way or another, it seems that thanks to our ability to learn associatively, our brain has created a relationship between emoticons and the emotions they intend to represent, thanks to this and technology, it seems that these small drawings, even represented by stuffed animals, have come to our way of connecting to stay.
The study of emoticons offers very wide possibilities, a question that we can ask ourselves is whether the emoticons we usually use say something about our personality, beyond the immediate communication context of which they are part.
Thus, according to a small experiment conducted by the publicist Daniel Brill, the usual use of the crying face for laughter would speak of excessively provocative personalities, the use of the laughing face showing the teeth of defensive personalities, and the excessive use of certain animals, such as octopus, would speak of a personality that has difficulty relating.
These notes do not go beyond curiosity, since the study had enough methodological flaws to make the conclusions not solid, however, the truth is that there is a very rich area that remains to be explored, because if something seems clear is that the Emoticons arrived to stay.