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People communicate in a lot of ways. They speak, use sign language, write a letter, compose mobile texts and chat for one single reason; to convey meaningful messages to keep the conversation going. Yet, with the evolution of various communication media and with the advancement of several technologies, the way and how people communicate have tremendously undergone complete changes in which pictures, videos and audio clips also became a part of the intricate web of exchanging concepts and ideas.

Emoticons have always been criticized since time immemorial. In fact, in 1994, emoticons were demanded to be banned by a Seattle Times columnist. Are emoticons really considered as the “smallpox of the internet”?

How do emoticons affect the emotions of people on Facebook?

“A study in April found that the top trending word of the year, at that time, was emoji – the small digital images used to express an idea or emotion in electronic communication - which are continuing to spread like wildfire online.”

First, emoticons dominate social media, they can be found practically everywhere, on Facebook statuses, comments, messages, Twitter tweets etc. Then these graphics crawled its way on mobile chat applications like Line, KakaoTalk and Facebook messenger. Emoticons have gone a long way and goes beyond just a means of communication. There’s fortune resting on these graphics Facebook probably have seen, this could be the reason why the social media giant wants to acquire WhatsApp for billions of dollars.

Depending who a person is conversing with, smileys may be the most exasperating part of man’s language or these may be the best addition in today’s written communication. Social media sites like Facebook, these smileys are all over the place. They are in statuses, wall posts, messages etc millions of users from different parts of the world are using them and probably has become a part of how they communicate on a daily basis.

In the vast world of social media, chaos and misunderstanding come into place, especially when it comes to communicating with friends and acquaintances worldwide. Imagine sending a message half-way across the globe and being understood clearly is not an easy task. There are various communication barriers that we need to consider before our messages are communicated and perceived properly. Facebook is one of the most well-known social networking sites around the world. According to recent Facebook statistics, worldwide there are over 1.28 billion monthly active Facebook users which is a 15% increase year over year. Based on this number, statistically, Facebook is too big to ignore. This number also shows the relative value of the number of Facebook users to the number of comments being posted every day or every second. Yes, every 60 seconds on Facebook: 510 comments are posted, 293,000 statuses are updated, and 136,000 photos are uploaded (Source: The Social Skinny). The relationship of these numbers has its implication. Since there are numerous active Facebook users which are increasing by 15% year over year and at the same time a lot of information being posted online every second, one must be creative and intuitive enough to catch everyone’s attention. Quality and strategy on what one posts matter a lot.

A study shows that emoticons can either temper or boost the emotional punch of what the user writes, suggesting they're not extraneous flourishes in a message, but helpful cues that clarify what the user really wants to convey. According to a 2007 experiment, sad messages have more impact with a :( and joyful messages seem more joyful with a :). In fact, the simple combination of a colon, parenthesis and dash is a closer stand-in for a smile than you might realize: A study published this year determined our brains process emoticons and human faces closely the same way.

In the era when internet and the World Wide Web had been parts of our daily activities came the engagement of web-users to different languages which only this internet generation can understand. Our ancestors might cringe in the thought of how easily we communicate and how easily we change the way we communicate with each other. Unlike in ancient times when too much effort was done to create smoke and different tribal sounds to communicate with people on far locations. Nowadays, communicating to people all across the globe is as easy as tapping a key. Thus, millions of social networking sites do not only offer posting of pictures and statuses, they also come with free SMS messaging services for no extra cost as long as the user is connected to the internet.

A picture is worth a thousand words, Facebook symbols make a simple stand out for there are tons of emoticons to show what the user is feeling without using dozens of words or a very long testimonial just to explain that the user has a broken heart and needed a drink.