The evolution of the emoticon

The first symbol that has been used in written communication to add an emotion was introduced in 1912 (!) by Ambrose Bierce . He proposed "an improvement in punctuation — the snigger point, or note of cachinnation: it is written thus \___/! (it presents a smile)
In 1963, the "smiley face", a yellow button with two black dots representing eyes and an upturned thick curve representing mouth, was created by freelance artist Harvey Ball. It was realized on order of a large insurance company as part of a campaign to bolster the morale of its employees and soon became a big hit. This smiley presumably inspired many later emoticons; the most basic graphic emoticon depicts this is in fact a small, yellow, smiley face.
Emoticons actually derived from a guy (Scott E. Fahlman) who noted on a online bullitin board that people would post a humorous comment, but others would not get the joke. This led to countless flames and meaningless discussions. In other words communicating without emotions doesn’t really work.

Posted is this brilliant video from Gnarlz Barkley (cool song as well) which shows us the current proficiencies of the emoticon:-)