Emoticons

History and Controversies

The history of the emoticon begins in 1979, with Kevin MacKenzie. As Internet lore has it, MacKenzie was troubled by the flame wars (online fighting) on one of the original mailing lists of the ARPANET, called MsgGroup. MacKenzie, who was apparently a “rank newbie” to MsgGroup, wrote a note suggesting a way to help list users with what he saw as the loss of emotional nuances in cyberspace. Using an idea he'd found in Readers Digest, MacKenzie proposed that if someone meant sarcasm in a post, they use the symbol -) to indicate “tongue in cheek.” The first emoticon was born.

From MacKenzie's first missive, the use of emoticons has caused controversy online. Original critics of the idea argued that emoticons would further erode the ability of people to communicate clearly and use language creatively in cyberspace. Today's critics maintain that the rise of corporate culture on the Internet has made the use of emoticons even more pernicious. For instance, America Online's Instant Messaging software contains built-in defaults that turn users' typed emoticons into AOL proprietary icons, so that :-) is now automatically rendered as a smiley face unless a user deliberately overrides the decision. Purists charge that by rendering emoticons as icons, corporations are eroding one of the earliest forms of ASCII art on the Internet.

Still, most 'Net popularizers insist that emoticons in any form help online communication more than they hurt it. At their most basic level, emoticons are perhaps the crudest attempts to address the issue of emotion and feelings among users in computer environments, in the absence of the “high bandwidth” capacities of live, face-to-face contact. “I'm worried about what may need to be called ‘stunted emotions’ [online],” said computer scientist Rosalind Picard of MIT, in a 1998 interview with First Monday. Picard defined stunted emotions as “the misinterpretation of the mood of your e-mail, or when conversations take ten times longer [Page 178]than necessary because the writers weren't skilled enough to convert vocal intonation into text, and the danger of what will happen to people if they spend all their waking hours interacting with and through a device that constantly ignores their emotions.”

Emotional Computing Present and Future

To address these issues, the Affective Computing Lab at MIT has been established to address “computing that relates to, arises from, or deliberately influences emotions.” Picard's group has already developed a number of affective computing protoypes, including eyeglasses with the ability to sense if the wearer is furrowing his brow in confusion or raising it in interest. Another approach can be found in the Conversational Agents division of MIT, headed by linguistics expert Justine Cassell. Embodied conversational agents are computer-generated cartoon-like characters that can emulate humans in face-to-face conversation. For example, Rea is a life-sized animated humanoid figure on a screen developed by Cassell's group. Rea not only understands the conversational behaviors of people in front of her, she also responds herself with appropriate speech, animated hand gestures, body movements, and facial expressions.

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