[music playing] Humans have always been interested in exploring emotion through some new kind of typography.

With emoticons, you're transferring a bit of your creative self and emotional self into a icon.

I think that adds so much to the conversation or the relationship.

The combination of images and words, I think, is extremely powerful.

And that's where the potential to say new things comes.

[music playing] Traditionally, writing wasn't really supposed to reflect our usual give and take that we have in a conversation.

If you think about punctuation, the main ways to do that in the English system is either an exclamation point for expression of joy or wonder or anger.

But then the question mark, of course.

And that relates specifically to a interrogative form of the language.

And that's about it, traditionally.

[typing] But humans have always been interested in exploring emotion through some new kind of typography.

One interesting example was an American humor magazine called "Puck," which way back in 1881, presented a series of different dashes and parentheses and so forth to create little faces.

Also, in the 1880s, Ambrose Bierce, who was writing for the "San Francisco Examiner" at the time, he gave a suggestion of what he called a snigger point.

And that was just basically a right parenthesis on its side that would look like a smile to indicate a bit of levity.

Then into the 20th century, Vladimir Nabokov was quoted in "The New York Times" about wouldn't it be nice, again, to have what he called this supine round bracket.

Again, a kind of a smiley to indicate that one was not completely seriously in one's writing.

And so these varied suggestions were milling around, but none of them were really taken up seriously.

But that changed with the advent of networked computing.

In 1982, Scott Fahlman recognized that on early internet forums, there was often this kind of miscommunication.

And came up with the colon, the dash, right parenthesis to indicate a smiley face.

Now people are being creative.

They're finding new possibilities.

In Japan, for instance, they took the idea of emoticons and developed more complex symbols for expressing different types of emotion.

And so, you know, these things can develop very quickly, of course, where people who previously had not used emoticons very much suddenly find themselves using it quite often.

I think new tools create new thoughts and new thoughts demand new tools.

So in some ways, I think we've reached the limits of print as a way of expressing ourselves.

Those rigid lines on white pages aren't very good at expressing more fluid thoughts.

Part of what's going on here is an increased use of the power of irony.

We're in an age when beliefs are held more loosely, when we don't believe in the same gods, the same morals, that we used to.

So I think we have to modulate.

We have to control the degree of seriousness we apply to things.

And that's where I think the potential to say new things comes.

But people always put down a new form of communication as soon as it arrives.

When Plato talks about writing, he talks about it as a supplement to speech.

And I think the way some people now talk about emoticons is they're just a supplement, they're just an add on to the more important way of communicating.

But these new forms of communication are much more than mere supplements.

They're going to give us new ways of thinking, and that through a combination of words and images, it might be possible to say more.

FRED BENENSON: "Emoji Dick" is "Moby Dick" translated into Japanese emoji.

It's this 800-page volume of emoji next to the original sentence that Melville wrote.

I didn't do the translation.

I hired people on Amazon's Mechanical Turk service to do the translation.

I was interested in seeing what the human mind could do to try to boil some of these very complex and floral sentences down into these simple emoticons.

And I think it's successful in that.

I don't know if it's wholly successful, that 10% to 20% of it has this brilliant nuance and humor and creativity.

In terms of literature and the future of language, does it portend good or bad things?

I'm not going to go there.

I think this is just the beginning.

I think we'll continue to see emoji represented in culture.

There are now music videos that are just like comprised of emoji.

Katy Perry has one.

This year in February the Library of Congress asked to acquire a copy.

They were like, we want us to be the first full complete book of emoji.

You know, in 100 years will people be like, in the early 2000s, when people started using emoticons, that's what we saw the beginnings of this new thing that totally changed communication.

We'll see.

I mean, that's where it's like really exciting.

Currently it's hard to see a time when emoticons might serve a more formal purpose, but the conventions have not been standardized.

And so even in formal writing, there are possibilities for change.

Emoticons have been part of web culture since it started.

They go even farther back than that.

They're not going anywhere.

MITCH STEPHENS: There's something lost and something gained with all technology.

And I would never underestimate words.

But I think emoticons have the potential to make words more significant.

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