Dumb as a Rock: My Path to Understanding Emoticons.

s continue to rear their cute little faces. This article, on the science of emoticons, lead  to reading a 2011 NYT story on emoticons in the workplace. Today, as I used Slack for the first time, it was surprising to discover emoticons embedded in the ecosystem. This revelation lead to an Emoji Cheat Sheet  for enterprise tools including Github, Basecamp and others. Facebook added them back in 2013 in an effort to, "...bring more ways for users to express themselves through small pictures" according to Adweek. Though friends and connections have been using emoticons for years, I'm an emoticon.  I thought their use degraded the written word, especially in a professional setting. Call me a curmudgeon. (Yes, as a matter of fact, I do believe people drive too fast these days).

Then it hit me. Nestled just off 101, right over the Golden Gate Bridge you'll find Ring Mountain: a Marin County Parks Open-Space Preserve and my favorite refuge. The area was home to Coastal Miwok Indians who carved petroglyphs into the mountain's boulders  more than 2,400 years ago. You can just make them out in this image (oval shapes in the center).


Zooming out from Petroglyph Rock and shifting slightly to the right, you'll see San Francisco's skyline. The view changes daily as sky-scrapers continue to sprout. These buildings house tech boomers, like Twitter, that specialize in brief, rapid communication. So it's full-circle, from carving images in rocks to inserting digital faces. Each medium is a shade on the palette of self-expression. To downplay or ignore new colors is a limitation, not a better path.

Long live .