:) The Anniversary of the Smiley

So according to some, the smiley just celebrated its 25th anniversay yesterday (http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/nation/5144533.html. The article mentions that Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott E. Fahlman claims to be the first person to use the sequence of characters :-) to convey an emotion.

In response to this, I wanted to share my thoughts on emotions in the digital age...

To me it's interesting that 25 years later, it is still pretty hard to convey emotion through digital means. We still have essentially the same characters on the keyboard, but now when we communiate in certain ways such as by email or blog postings, we can use color, pictures, docs, etc to help convey emotions (whether we intend to or not)

I think sometimes you can tell a lot about a person in how they write to you digitally (how much they write, how clear they are, etc), but I think this all in the interpretation, and dependent on a person's ability to perceive things like this...

I also think that a big difference between the digital world and the real world as that in the real world, it's much harder to hide emotions when you are talking to someone face to face, or even over the phone, as compared to in the digital world of numbers and words.

Maybe in 25 years the emotions we are thinking as we type digitally will be captured in a way that as a person reads, and they will also be able to detect those emotions... unless you don't want to share them that is...