Informant Background:

This informant is a sophomore at USC in the Naval ROTC program. Very soft spoken and polite, she grew up in Anaheim California. Considering herself a typical teenager through highschool, she had a fondness for the urban legends that circulated throughout the school.

Informant’s story:

“Well, something popular today that I’m pretty sure everyone knows about are the little faces you can make using the symbols on a key board. There’s like, the normal smiley face with the colon and parenthesis, the surprised face with the colon and capital ‘O’, and a bunch of others. They can be really simple like those or more complex lie [explanation how to make the following face] (^_^). I’ve seen some really complex ones though. Like, full dinosaurs and stuff. I don’t know who has the time and patience to make them, but I just copy and paste them into my Facebook and chat and stuff.”

Analyses:

What the Informant is what is known as “ASCII art”. “ASCII” which stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. It is essentially source code that changes numbers into other symbols that aren’t numbers, as computers can only accept numbers. These symbols include the entire alphabet, every grammatical symbol, and any other symbol you can put into a text box. There are a total of 128 of these symbols. “ASCII art” is the ability to take these symbols in order to create some form of design. As the informant noted, these designs can be as simple as the classic :), to as complicated as designs spanning several lines, consisting of hundreds of characters. These designs are used primarily as reactions, meaning the design is posted in response to something else that was posted. With ASCII art becoming so common, many separate programs have been designed to recognize these series of symbols to actually create the picture in which the symbols are supposed to represent. These cartoons that replace the symbols are known as “emojis” and are common among such programs as Facebook, imessage, and Kik.

Examples of ASCII art:

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

ლ(ಠ益ಠლ)

( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

……(\_/)
……( ‘_’)
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/”””””””””””””””””””\
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