What is “Covfefe”?
Our ancestors could have helped work out it’s meaning for us… 👵
“Covfefe” has a long history: ⌛
Humans started talking around 500,000 years ago 💬
Yet, it took us a lot of time to begin writing Tweets ✍🏻
30,000 years ago we started marking things for memory and remembering. The technical term is a “petroglyph” 📅
25,000 years later we started drawing images (pictographs), you know, Hieroglyphics ☯
Damn, we were a slow species 🐢
Pictographs were able to represent concepts, objects, activities, places or events 🚗
Pictographs got more advanced to what we now call “Ideograms”, which were able to convey abstract ideas 💖
Then we got smart 5,000 years ago: we could make a picture equal a word… A logographic! 🆒
4,000 years later we made a picture equal a letter 🅱️
The alphabet! 🔤
2,000 years ago we invented paper 🧻
500 years ago we invented the printing press 📗
Everything got quicker… 💨
✔️ Telephone ☎️
✔️ Radio 📻
✔️ Television 📺
✔️ Facsimile 📠
✔️ Pager 📟
✔️ Mobile Telephone 📱
✔️ Internet 📡
✔️ Etc..
In 1982, Carnegie Mellon professor Dr. Scott Fahlman invented emoticons 💡
They were the modern pictographs: a way to represent concepts, objects, activities, places or events ⚛️
When you were using MS-DOS, all you had was “terminal” typeface — monospaced not even as nice as Courier 🖥️
Crossed-zeros and ugly as! 🤢
So, what emoticons did was add context and nuance to the words printed in “terminal” typeface, unlike the centuries before where print was able to add images and photographs 👩🏫
Such luxury was not afforded in computing 🤑
Then, the internet matured and we could replicate images and photographs of the Gutenberg press days 📷
Problem solved 🎉
Again, images and photographs in the internet age added context and nuance to the accompanying words 🔑
Then mobile telephony came along and we reverted back to the “terminal” typeface equivalent 👴🏻
Remember the Nokia 3210? 📱
Lol 😂
Emoticons gained resurgence (now in the mobile space) when emojis were invented in 1999 by Shigetaka Kurita 💡
Emojis became the modern ideograms 🆕
Now we are heading into an era of more private one-on-one mobile and messaging communication, emojis (and to some extend emoticons) will become even more important in texting communication, unless we want to try to reduce the misunderstanding words like “covfefe”! 😕
