Twenty-five years ago, Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott E. Fahlman says, he was the first to use three keystrokes — a colon followed by a hyphen and a parenthesis — as a horizontal "smiley ...

In a video installation by James Joyce, a yellow circle rotates as two black ovals and a curved line tumble at the bottom, thwarted by gravity. Watching the video, Perseverance in the Face of ...

The world's first emoticon may have existed long before computers, smartphones and the Internet ever even existed. A literary critic has discovered what could be the first smiley face buried within a ...

STOP THE PRESSES! The big news in tech this morning is that Gmail has introduced a feature I’m surprised it didn’t have already: emoticons. Lots and lots of emoticons. In two styles: squarish-headed ...

The emoticon is old. Or, young, 30 years young! Either way, it's a bona fide grown-up symbol now, with the life experience under its lack of a belt (for it has no waist) to prove it. But it has ...

Emoji has sort of taken over my iMessage conversations on the iPhone lately, and I’m willing to bet you use a lot of the cute little pictures too. What if I told you there was a hidden treasure trove ...

Today emoticons are so pervasive that behavioral science has taken an active interest in how people use them. Among the evidence (recently surveyed by Roni Jacobson at the great new Science of Us blog ...

Thirty-three years ago today, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University invented the emoticon. Scott E. Fahlman, along with other members of CMU's computer science community, used online "bulletin ...

With three simple keystrokes, Scott Fahlman brought a smile to the internet. In a 1982 message board post, Fahlman, a computer scientist at Carnegie-Mellon University, proposed using typographical ...

Don't :- ( It's time to celebrate the emoticon's birthday by remembering the simpler days when all smileys were sideways. Eric Mack has been a CNET contributor since 2011. Eric and his family live 100 ...

Emotion is something that is incredibly difficult to get across in a digital format. Aside from ending your texts with “lol” to appear less threatening, or ending a tweet with “/s” to indicate sarcasm ...

The emoticon is old. Or, young, 30 years young! Either way, it's a bona fide grown-up symbol now, with the life experience under its lack of a belt (for it has no waist) to prove it. But it has ...