Emoji Explained. At a family barbecue last summer, my octogenarian grandmother watched quietly as my cousin Sarah and I, both in our mid-twenties, both hopelessly, tragically attached to our iPhones, carried them faithfully from the screened-in porch to the kitchen to the backyard, idly checking social media apps and, in my case, taking photos of my parents’ dog and of my mother, who looked endearingly absurd sunbathing on the grass with her face wrapped in a scarf. “When you’re typing on the phone,” my grandma finally said, with great, curious intent, “do you spell out ‘are’ and ‘you’ or do you just use the letters ‘r’ and ‘u’?” We thought for a second, before telling her we tended to spell them out. “Then what,” she said, looking frustrated, “is texting?” It’s a fair question, and not easily answered. In theory, it’s a practical way to communicate quickly, or silently, or both. Don’t have time for a phone conversation?
And those are just the tip of the iceberg. Sometimes I send them on their own. Emoticon Origins :-) In Praise of the Hashtag. For this, of course, we can thank Twitter. Five years ago, Twitter’s users invented what’s now known as the hashtag: a pithy phrase, preceded by that hungry octothorpe, used to either label or comment on the preceding tweet. (Pretend this sentence is a tweet. #thiswouldbethehashtag.) In the early days, hashtags were primarily functional — a way of categorizing tweets by topic so that members of the Twittersphere could follow conversations of interest to them by searching for a list of similarly tagged tweets.
The first hashtag, proposed by the user Chris Messina, was intended to collate conversations about the tech conference BarCamp, so the hashtag was #barcamp. Over time, though, the hashtag has evolved into something else — a form that allows for humor, darkness, wordplay and, yes, even poetry. As a result, we’ve arrived at a strange moment for the hashtag. Yet the rise of the hashtag’s commercial possibilities shouldn’t lead us to overlook what is truly remarkable about it. Is That an Emoticon in 1862? Brooklyn today is a destination for celebrities and wealthy creative types, but not so long ago, it was the default settlement for young immigrants without money. When the Big City Book Club convenes next, we’ll be reading Colm Toibin’s acclaimed 2009 novel, “Brooklyn,” the story of a young Irishwoman who leaves a fragile mother behind to find herself in Dodgerland in the early 1950s.
Brooklyn College and the Fulton Mall both make appearances in a book that explores the conflict between familial obligation and one’s own youthful heart and promise. The online discussion will take place on Monday, May 19, starting at 6:30 p.m. Join the club and receive regular email updates. Emoticon, Emoji, Text: Pt. 1, I Second That Emoticon. (This is the first in a three-part sequence to be published on Rhizome.) “A new word is like a fresh seed sewn on the ground of the discussion.” -- L. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (trans. Peter Winch) “If writers wrote as carelessly as some people talk, then adhasdh asdglaseuyt[bn[ pasdlgkhasdfasdf.” -- L. Snicket, A Series of Unfortunate Events By September of 1982, the Computer Science Bulletin Board System at Carnegie Mellon University was a social hotspot, at least for certain science professors and tech geeks. Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs or bboards) pre-date the Web as such; they allowed users to dial into a local hub, through which they could send messages to and receive messages from other machines dialed into the same hub.
Bulletin Board Systems became popular on many college campuses, absorbing some of the discourse of the hallway and the common room, and attracting those people—like physicists and Heideggerians—predisposed to adopt hobbies with steep learning curves. and: but: