![]() ![]() But he soon realized that the meanings of emoticons themselves were highly subjective. Fahlman had devised the emoticons to help clarify the meaning of online texts. “Within a few months, we started seeing the lists with dozens of ‘smilies’: open-mouthed surprise, person wearing glasses, Abraham Lincoln, Santa Claus, the pope, and so on,” each of which conjured a slightly different vibe when deployed in a new context. The frown emoticon that Fahlman pitched to mark a serious post “quickly evolved into a marker for displeasure, frustration, or anger,” Fahlman wrote. But as his emoticons gained traction on early computer systems, they took on emotional lives of their own. For this, useįahlman is widely credited with inventing the keyboard-rendered facial expression. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. I propose … the following character sequence for joke markers: The judge disagreed, writing that the emoticon “does not materially alter the meaning of the text message.” A proper understanding of the symbol, the man argued, would have led a reasonable officer to understand that he was not “sadistically bloodthirsty for revenge” against the woman, but rather just “deeply unhappy” about the status of their friendship. In his defense, the student argued that several text messages he’d sent to a friend-in which he called himself a “petty bastard” who wanted to make his classmate “feel crappy” and experience “deep dark pits of depression”-should never have been taken seriously by police because he’d thrown a couple of wry emoticons in, including one indicating a stuck-out tongue. When prosecutors declined to press charges, the student sued the woman, his school, and the cops, claiming that the investigation had been launched without cause and executed unlawfully. District Court judge in Michigan was asked to rule on the meaning of “:-P.” The case concerned a University of Michigan law student who was investigated by local cops after a female classmate reported that he had been stalking and harassing her online. ![]()
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