The Emoticon Generation Read Free Page A

‘bug off’. That’s it. Start to finish. If you have food on your plate, and you are not fighting for your life, the only vocabulary you’ll need is those two words.” Then he adds with a wink, “If you’re honest with yourself, that is.”
    Ironically, in Ping! Fox has come up with exactly two words, but different than the ones he insists we need to say. It began with only one word. Remember the inexplicable exclamation marks and moon icons I found in my daughter’s iPhone? Those are Fox’s. They are each a word which we do not have in the English language.
    The idea came to Fox one night, when he was reading a friend’s tweets. The particular tweet that caught Fox’s attention was comprised only of half words, abbreviations, and emoticons. Suddenly Fox saw a jumble of symbols, and he began to understand words differently. “It was an apple-just-fell-on-my-head moment,” he says.
    Fox was haunted by the clarity of what emoticons really were: “Emoticons are not words, they’re smaller than words.” Without realizing what he was doing, he walked out of the house, and sat in the street for hours, until, at 4 a.m., it came to him.
    “The thought that haunted me was: how small could a word be and still be a word? What is the minimum feeling I would ever have to convey?” In those few hours, he played around with thousands of words and concepts and emotions, looking for the smallest one possible. In the end, he found it.
    “I found it!” he exclaims, and there’s fire in his eyes today. He really does see himself as another Newton, discovering something that has been in front of our eyes but never been acknowledged. “One word and one word only. The only word you would ever need.” He leans in closer, and his eyes sparkle. “Ping!” he whispers.
    A Ping! is written as an exclamation mark and it carries with it meaning only teenagers are (so far) aware of. When a person sends someone else a Ping!, he is saying, “I’m thinking of you”. Or, in Fox’s lingo, that would be “I’m giving you attention”.
    Remember? People don’t need words, according to Fox, they need attention.
    The instant Ping! was released into the internet wild, it spread like wildfire among the tweeting teens.
    Within a week, teenagers across the U.S. and, in fact, the world, were sending exclamation marks to each other. The second a teenager receives an exclamation mark, he or she can send one back. Girlfriends can tell their boyfriends they’re thinking of them. Boyfriends can communicate with and flatter their girlfriends, without needing to resort to those pesky conversations. Secret admirers can send Pings to their objects of desire. Not only did high schools across the world become hotbeds for attention, attention had to be given back.
    A week after that, everything changed. “Evolution in the internet is so quick,” says Fox. “If you blink for a few days, you’ve missed something. And then you’re dead.”
    Fox never blinks. He noticed that after a week, people were not satisfied with sending single Pings!. People were sending five, ten, fifteen, twenty exclamation marks in a row. Teenagers wanted to show how they really really really really feel, and one ‘really’ wasn’t enough. Messages in Facebook and Twitter and emails and text messages were filled with dozens and sometimes hundreds of Pings! in a row.
    In a day, Fox came up with and released the next product on his line: Colored Pings! A normal black Ping! is a regular exclamation mark. A yellow Ping! (a yellow exclamation mark) stands for five Pings! An orange Ping! stands for 10 Pings! And so on: Red is a hundred, green is a thousand, purple is fifty thousand, and blue is infinity.
    Cut to a few days later, and Fox’s premise that we don’t need any other words seemed truer than ever. All over the country, high schools, college campuses, grade schools and junior high schools were filled with teens not playing around, but sitting down and exchanging