The Unlikely Evolution Of The @ Symbol
Once a bookkeepers’ shorthand, @ has
become the fulcrum of our digital identities. How did that happen?
For a moment, let’s not think about
the @ symbol in the way we usually think of it, as the fulcrum of an email
address, the navel connecting us to our Twitter handles, or even just the weird
a hanging out above the 2 key.
Let’s imagine it instead blinking upon
a screen. It exists as our focal point in a Metaverse of text. It’s a world
with endless layers, the geometries, architectures, and inhabitants of which
are likewise described by symbols on our keyboard. And in this world, @ is our
avatar: a logogram of power that, once inscribed, represents our identity in an
entirely digital world.
This metaphor for the @ symbol may
seem exotic, but it isn’t new. Some of the very first computer video games
(called roguelikes) used @ to represent the player as he explored rudimentary
ASCII dungeons. "This is you, and you are at this location within our
cyber world."
More to the point, that’s how we
still use it. Popularized and rejuvenated by its insertion before every Twitter
handle, the @ symbol today is almost a pronoun. It has a very personal meaning
for billions of people across the planet. It’s the symbol that means “digital
me.”
What makes this such an incredible
feat is that before until about 20 years ago, few people had ever used an @
symbol at all, and if they did, they used it in a very different way than they
do now.
"If you look at how we use
typography, the human brain seems to only have room in its mental character set
for a finite number of characters," says Keith Houston, the author of the
upcoming book Shady Characters: The Secret Life Of
Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks. "We’re just not
willing to slot in new symbols, or change the meaning of old characters. We
just don’t have the room."
So unlike words, the definitions of
which tend to evolve through usage, the meaning of a symbol or character tends
to be put in stasis by the cultural momentum behind it. The @ symbol, however,
has done something unique, shrugging off centuries of momentum to evolve
multiple times in the span of little more than a single generation.
Part of what made that accomplishment
possible was the @ symbol’s obscurity to begin with. Ever since the 1500s, and
for hundreds of years after, the only people who used @ were bookkeepers, who
used it as a shorthand to show how much they were selling or buying goods for:
for example, "3 bottles of wine @ $10 each."
The @ symbol has shrugged off
centuries of cultural momentum to evolve multiple times.
Since these bookkeepers used @ to
deal with money, a certain degree of whimsical fondness for the character
developed over time. In Danish, the symbol is known as an “elephant’s trunk a”;
the French call it an escargot. It’s a streudel in German, a monkey’s tail in
Dutch, and a rose in Istanbul. In Italian, it’s named after a huge amphora of
wine, a liquid some Italian bookkeepers have been known to show a fondness for.
Even with such cute names to
recommend it, though, @ languished in obscurity for three and a half centuries,
only ending up on a new invention called the typewriter when salesmen realized
that accountants and bookkeepers were buying them in droves.
In 1971, however, a keyboard with a
vestigial @ symbol inherited from its typewriter ancestors found itself hooked
up to an ARPANET terminal
manned by Ray Tomlinson, who was working on a little program he’d come up with
in his goofing-off time to send messages from computer to computer. Tomlinson
ended up using the @ symbol as the fulcrum of the lever that ultimately ended
up lifting the world into the digital age: email.
"It’s difficult to imagine
anyone in Tomlinson’s situation choosing anything other than the '@' symbol,
but his decision to do so at the time was inspired," explains Houston on
his blog. "Firstly, it was extremely unlikely to occur in any
computer or user names; secondly, it had no other significant meaning for the
operating system on which it would run, and lastly, it read intuitively--user
‘at’ host."
It was as simple as that, but
through this one serendipitous accident of typography, @ became the navel of
the digital body we now call the Internet. It stopped being a sign for how much
something cost and became a symbol of an infinite number of end points on a digital
umbilicus: an origin, a destination, or some point--terminating in a human--in
the system in-between.
The @ symbol became the call sign
for the dot-com bubble.
As email matured, and early
mass-market Internet services like Prodigy and America Online became popular, @
became even more typographically unique. It stood alone on the keyboard as the
one symbol known more for its association with the Internet than for anything
else. And as multiple service providers and technology companies grappled with trying
to mass-market this new “World Wide Web” to consumers, the @ symbol became the
call sign for the dot-com bubble.
"In the late-'90s, the @ symbol
actually became generic," Houston argues. "It was like Apple’s 'i’
prefix, or putting 'e’ in front of everything is today."
In fact, it became tacky. A symbol
which had been chosen for email by virtue of its clarity, its elegance, and its
relative obscurity became just another sticker in the box of cynical marketers
looking to disguise analog companies and products for the turn of the
millennium. Got something you want to jam to those console cowboys in
cyberspace? Just put an “e-“ in front of it, slap a dot-com at the end, and
replace all the a's with @ symbols. "Eat e-b@n@n@s! Dot com!"
Inevitably, the @ symbol as the
internationally recognized logo for anything “cyber” became played out.
Laughably so, in fact. Stumble across one of Europe’s remnant
"CyberC@fes" today and the default reaction is a sort of bemusement
and smirking superiority that we reserve for other quaintly naive cultural
relics of the retro-future, like putting “2000” at the end of something or
1950s Popular Mechanics articles on robot housemaids. By the early
2000s, the @ symbol was pretty much dead except as the thing sandwiched in the
middle of two halves of an email address.
But then Twitter happened, and the @
symbol reinvented itself yet again--this time purifying itself from a
dot-com-era cliché into a rune of Internet identity.
When Twitter first launched in 2006,
the service’s modus operandi was to offer a blogging platform tiny enough that
it could be done by mobile (dumb) phones. The 140-character limit Twitter
imposes upon tweets to this day is a relic from this time, in which any tweet
needed to be short enough that it could squeeze inside a 160-character SMS text
message. Consequently, Twitter was much more no-frills back then than it is
now. In fact, when the service launched, it didn’t even have a reply mechanism.
If you wanted to reply to someone’s tweet, you just sort of responded into the
ether in any way you hoped might catch another user’s attention.
The @ symbol’s adoption as Twitter’s
accepted reply mechanism happened organically, and took about eight months. The
first use of an @ reply can be traced to Thanksgiving Day, 2006, when a couple
of Yahoo UK programmers named Ben Darlow and Neil Crosby started using it (as
they wrote at the time) as a "pseudo-syntax to let a Follower on twitter
know that you’re directing a comment at them." Just two months later, the
@ reply was the universal Twitter reply mechanism, and now, you can type @ and
follow it with the name of pretty much anyone on any social network to direct a
reply to them.
Two Yahoo UK programmers started
using it @ as a 'pseudo-syntax to let a Follower on twitter know that you’re
directing a comment at them.'
As with its use in email, it’s hard
to imagine Twitter not using @ to have conversations. But as with email, the decision
was inspired. It was relatively easy to type on T9 cell phone keypads, and read
intuitively: You were directing a comment “at” someone else. But instead of
being used as it is used in email--a symbol used to tell your computer that you
want to direct a message to a specific person at a specific location--the @
symbol has now become something much more abstract: a one-character prefix that
is used to identify a person’s digital presence on a social network.
Whether on Facebook, Flickr, or
Twitter, type @ into almost any social network and you can direct a reply
straight to another user. Just as in the earliest computer games, @ now clearly
represents people who are inhabiting a digital world. "This is you. You
are at here."
"All characters evolve in the
way they are used, but the @ symbol’s evolution has been particularly
striking," Houston says. "It was mundane for a long time, only to
undergo a startling transition during the beginning of the computer revolution
that put it at the center of the way we think about the Internet."
But how permanent is this meaning
for @, and could it be upended by another revolution that completely changes
its meaning for our children and their children?
"The @ symbol is pretty well
associated with digital identity now, so it’s hard to see how it could be
divorced from that," Houston claims. "These days, revolutions are
getting incrementally smaller. The @ symbol has become our emblem for our
online selves. I think that meaning is here to stay."
http://www.fastcodesign.com/1672733/the-unlikely-evolution-of-the-symbol
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