Emoticons as a another route of non-verbal communication

I'm going to tackle now something appart from class but has to do with communication: Emoticons.

Back when the first cell phones were made and when Messenger appeared, something new was created: Emoticons. Those are faces that represent people's emotional status. There were two types: On the cell phones, people normally used some alphabetic symbols that readed, looked like a face. For example: :-) . The two dots represents the eyes, the dash a nose and the closed bracket the mouth. That means that person is smiling. On Messenger, on the other hand, were actually faces that were shown when you wrote the legend

The legend of the default emoticons on Messenger. Source

They had a huge impact on the new communication devices made in that time, so much that we're still using then those days. Several web pages were made in order to download more emoticons on Messenger and it was normal to find names with emoticons. People always tend to use them to express their feelings, emotions, to write shorter, to be sarcastic or ironic, etc. When you're not facing a person it's easy sometimes to know how are they, but now when using distant communication, so the emoticons are an excellent tool that hans't passed away yet.