Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
In the 1980s, an era of dial-up modems and expensive connectivity, real-time text chat
represented state of the art. For most computer users until 1991, almost the entire In-
ternet was text-based, but that did not mean users lacked expressive graphical means
(1991 hailed the launching of the World Wide Web and emergence of general image
compression codecs such as jpeg). For a long time, emoticons, the graphical manipula-
tion of regular punctuation, were the primary use of “avatars” in everyday computing.
;-)
If you, dear reader, have never before seen an image like this except as absurd punc-
tuation, please cock your head to the left and you will see the icon represents a winking
smiley face. Or, consider (n_n), which is the Japanese emoticon for smiley face. The
emoticons indicate a human emotion, a smile, assembled from punctuation marks. In
this vein, computer text graphically conveys human sentiment; one also finds along this
line computer art made of ASCII code. In both cases, we find code (of different orders)
enlisted in the work of human communication by simulating images. We can read these
images because we have the ability to create meaning around abstraction, i.e., we have
a terrific drive for image making, image decoding, and, as I discuss below, attribut-
ing personality to the inanimate. In effect, with emoticons, we are making faces out of
things in a manner that hails a long history of iconicity. Media theorist Florian Cramer
writes of an irrepressible human urge to create icons:
Emblems, allegorical images, were hugely popular in the Renaissance since Italian human-
ist scholar Andreas Alciatus published the first emblem topic in 1531. Just as desktop icons
on computer operating systems were invented in the 1970s in the Xerox PARC labs in or-
der to simplify interaction with the computer as a machine performing formal-logical ma-
nipulations of coded symbols, emblems served to simplify and popularize interaction with
religious and philosophical meaning.
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As Cramer argues, making emblems or icons traditionally makes something complex
simpler, I see a human interest in conveying emotion. The iconic and the graphic, in
my estimation, have continuously been enlisted in making our relation to media and
our mediated relations between each other more social. We mark our things with faces
or other forms of proprietary markers to customize them in such a way that they feel
habitable. If we apply this logic to pervasive media, we now have a broadly expanded
territory we might call home.
