Catching up on the unread technical literature that’s been piling up these past couple of months, I found a July 10, 2007 Network World article (”Emoticon turning 25: Thank this guy … or not “) informing me that emoticons (e.g., the smiley-face “:-)” character sequence) will be turning 25 this year, having been whimsically introduced in the early 1980s by Carnegie-Mellon professor Scott Fahlman.

I was certainly using e-mail in the early ’80s, but I don’t remember when I started sending or receiving emoticons; and I think it was sometime in the late ’90s that I occasionally began using such cliched abbreviations as “lol”, “imho”, and sometimes even “rotflmao”.  Nowadays, it’s not only everywhere, but it has morphed into a whole language of its own: I’m utterly incapable of reading most of the IM messages sent by teenagers (which, of course, is part of their objective).

All of this is pretty minor stuff, but it does remind us how subtle and pervasive the influence of technology on society has become. It’s hard enough grasping the impact of something more tangible, concrete, and recognizable: the cell phone. I still remember the days of the late ’80s when a mobile phone in one’s car was considered space-age technology; and I remember some auto salesmen earnestly telling me that I could remove the entire unit from the trunk of my car — about the size of a briefcase, and weighing about 30 pounds — and take it with me if, for example, I wanted to park the car by the side of the road and wander into a nearby meadow for a picnic. I remember getting a cell phone in the early 1990s, but it was the size and weight of a brick, and I couldn’t manage to fit it into the pocket of my pants or my sport coat … and like most people, it was the late 1990s before the devices (incredibly crude and expensive by today’s standards) were finally adequate for everyday use. And now, only ten years later, I like to amuse myself by spotting the few people who aren’t chattering into a cell phone as I walk down the streets of New York City.

We all have a vague sense of what the technology — whether that of a cell phone, a personal computer, or some other computerized gadget — can do for us; but I think it may take a full generation to truly grasp the impact that it’s having on the culture, attitudes, expectations, assumptions, and biases of society. Having said that, I should also emphasize that none of this is an issue for the younger generations of our society; it’s the older generations who have so much “baggage” (in the form of assumptions, expectations, attitudes, etc.) that they have to unlearn, and then replace with a new set. For example, even though I’m intellectually well aware of the fact that we all carry our cell phones in our pockets, I still suffer a split-second delay before remembering that a phone is no longer associated with a place (except for landlines), but rather with a person (wherever he or she may be, and regardless of whether I know where he/she is). I can imagine circumstances where that split-second delay could be the difference between life and death; but even in my own relatively uneventful life, it could mean the difference betwee opportunities recognized, and opportunities overlooked.

So maybe I’ll sign up for a class on emoticons … not to learn the vocabulary or syntax, but rather to get a better appreciation for the social etiquette thereof …