#WINKING SMILEY FACE FOR FACEBOOK HOW TO#

They say the digital natives - that's generally people born after the year 2000 who have grown up with computers and the Internet as an integral part of their lives - are 'too lazy' to express themselves precisely with words. Some linguists say the rise of the emoticon is leading to the atrophy of the written language. You can choose from more than 720 icons on most smart phones - with icons ranging from the traditional smiley face to monsters, steaming feces, and bubbly champagne glasses. These small, ubiquitous symbols - known as emojis or emoticons - have gone from a quasi secret code, used by those who think it's natural to represent a smiley face with a colon, dash and closed bracket, to a fully fledged graphical part of the digital lingua franca.Įmojis are everywhere: in chat apps, such as Whatsapp, on social networks such as Facebook, and the virtually 'old-skool' text message.Īlone on Apple's iPhone, emojis have been downloaded more than 20 million times. Instead of drawing mammoths, fire and people throwing spears, we now go for comic figures, airplanes and people holding hands. Today, instead of using a piece of charcoal, we use our smart phones. We used to paint pictures on walls in caves. Or, at least, that’s what Facebook hopes.Just how did we arrive in the age of the emoji? Using little pictures to convey feeling, rather than words, might elicit more of a personal response from users. They created this dynamic emoticon that when you see it, it’s really powerful.” “We now know what it looks like and sounds like because of science. “It’s an under-appreciated emotion in Western culture,” Keltner explains. Sympathy, for example, can be hard to really get across in traditional emoticon form. And they tackled some emotions that aren’t usually represented by emoticons, like sympathy and gratefulness. Today, Facebook has added a bit of science to that yellow smiley. Ball’s design, which was first used on buttons, desk cards and posters, has since become a lasting international symbol. The “smiley face” designed by Harvey Ball has become a ubiquitous symbol since the Worcester, Mass., designer was hired by the e State Mutual Life Assurance Company to design a morale-boosting symbol for the company. It was originally the face of State Mutual Life Assurance Company. Last year, the classic yellow smiley face turned 30. Various reports (that we’ve been unable to verify) suggest that in 1979, an ARPANET user called Kevin MacKenzie, inspired by an unidentified Reader’s Digest article, suggested using punctuation to hint that something was “tongue-in-cheek,” as opposed to out-and-out humorous.Īpparently, MacKenzie thought a hypen and a bracket -) - would be a suitable symbol: “If I wish to indicate that a particular sentence is meant with tongue-in-cheek, I would write it so: ‘Of course you know I agree with all the current administration’s policies -).’ A transcript of one of Abraham Lincoln speeches included a winking face, but most agree that was probably just a typo. Mashable has a brief history of emoticons, which traces the murky beginnings of the little faces. That’s what the things were invented for. Of course, Pixar and Facebook aren’t the first ones to think of using emoticons to help people express emotions. “One of the questions that we asked was, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we had a better emoticon that was informed by science?’” “There’s all this communication that happens when you’re talking to someone face-to-face–you can see that they’re nodding and you can see their smile–that is not present when you’re communicating electronically,” Bejar explains.

#WINKING SMILEY FACE FOR FACEBOOK HOW TO#

So Facebook started thinking about how to add more emotional information to Facebook messaging. When people inserted a little more emotion into their messages asking friends to take down photos, Facebook found, the friend was more likely to respond or comply rather than just ignore the message. They started looking at how compassion research could help Facebook address the kind of interpersonal conflicts the company saw emerge in issue reporting.

Together, they created the set of emoticons that Facebook settled on. Pixar illustrator Matt Jones knows all too well how to manipulate our emotions with little animated characters. UC Berkeley psychology professor Dacher Keltner studies how people emotionally interact on social media. These emoticons are highly engineered: Facebook teamed up with a Pixar illustrator and a psychologist to make the most emotive emoticons it could. Those who logged into Facebook recently might have noticed some new faces-emoticons that users can now tack on to their status updates.

Winking smiley face for facebook