Middle-aged people using smileys make you want to throw up. But emoticons are here to stay :p 

 It’s getting hard to say anything genuine online any more. I sat at the keyboard for ten minutes yesterday trying to thank someone for their help without it looking like I was taking the p*ss. Properly punctuated, everything just looks angrily sarcastic or offhand.

That probably explains why emoticons (or “smileys” if you like, they both sound offensively cutesy) have conquered the world. I’m talking about colons followed by a closed parentheses which sometimes turn to actual cartoon, usually yellow, faces:

We use them to indicate we are being nice. If you don’t know what I mean then you’re probably unwittingly offending people every day.
Not long ago emoticons were just another bit of computer nerdery. Like “cookies” or “firewall settings”, you knew they existed but you never touched them. I was a teenager when these little yellow faces were popularised (the first digital one was in 1982 and in written form they go back to the 19th century, but they’ve spread thanks to instant messaging) and I couldn’t imagine any adult ever seriously using them. They belonged in gaming forums and emails between hopelessly wet teenyboppers.
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Surely, I predicted, by the time I reached full-time employment I would never see an emoticon again. In fact, the opposite has happened – as I’ve got older, they’ve got more and more common. Adults are the chief offenders. In email discussions about investment agreements and company valuations, you’ll see high-powered businessmen chucking in the winking face and, perhaps most sickeningly, the sticking-tongue-out-face :p in a bid to soften sentences.

Their success is down to the void they fill. Tom Chivers has written a wonderful analysis of how we use punctuation to avoid looking aggressive in instant messages. But sometimes "!" or "…" aren’t enough. In those instances, we turn to the library of earnest semaphore contained in the punctuation section of our keyboard. For example, look at the difference between these two sentences:

Usually the intention is to indicate “I am joking” or “I am not taking this seriously”, but sometimes smiley faces are chucked in passive aggressively, for example:

Naturally, in business, where the price of causing offence is much higher than in the rough and tumble world of teenage courting, emoticons are popular. And in an age where sarcasm is so prevalent, it’s become necessary to attach sincere little indicators of good faith to avoid being misinterpreted.
Socially, emoticons are a creative alternative to overused platitudes like “hahaha” and “awesome”. On Whatsapp – the instant messanging app more popular than Facebook among young people – choosing the relevant emoticon from the vast library (there’s about 70 on there) will spark delight. It’s actually becoming an art form. Today, the average person uses written communication more than at any other point in history. Inevitably, that’s left some words looking a little tired. When you’ve run out of ways to express appreciation, a well-chosen little image can be much more powerful than any word. They might look like an idiotic gimmick, but emoticons fulfil a vital social need – putting the other person at ease.