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Business as Usual?
 By now you have surely seen all of the smileys and emoticons that are all over the Internet, but do you know why they are used? Typically they are used to help convey an emotion or mood, such as a smiling face for happy. Originally invented as a way of letting people know how the typed information was meant, such as a tongue in cheek comment, or someone pulling your leg.
For instance, if someone posted something on a message board, which is much like a virtual bulletin board, that may be taken the wrong way by someone but it was meant in a fun or impish way the author could include a smiley face to let everyone know it was just in fun and not meant to be taken too seriously.
However, not too long ago there was an action taken that some people feel was wrong and that would have actually defeated the whole purpose of smileys and emoticons. Microsoft attempted to patent the creation of custom emoticons, the application covered selecting pixels to create an emoticon image, assigning a character sequence to those pixels and reconstructing them after transmission.
 There were some that said that it being such a basic concept they thought that it was joke or prank, something that an immature community member had done as a gag. What is everyone so worried about? Simply that smileys and emoticons cover basic human communication. They are a form of language and if there were to be some type of precedent allowing the patenting of language it could prove to be a big problem.
Naturally, most people would never even consider something like this as smileys and emoticons are still considered fun and entertaining not necessarily educational. Although there are educational foundations that do use them, it is normally done by schools as some type of art project or used to show how communications are changing.
You know, it would likely take away a great deal of the fun involved with smileys and emoticons, because that is what they are used for now and that is what they have always been about, fun and entertaining ways to get your point across and express emotions. Of course they are used for many different things, but you have to admit that when you see one in your correspondence there is a good chance that you will be smiling right along with it.
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