Take your middle fingers and bend each down at the bottom knuckle at a steep angle. Then take your index fingers and arch them down to touch. The rest of your hands curl out of sight. The resulting shape β a heart β is unmistakable. For as long as people have connected digitally, there have been ways to show love, with the heart being the most universal. The distinctive curves-and-point symbol was birthed in the 14th century when Italian physician Guido da Vigevano wrote a treatise on the dissection of a heart and drew it in the now-familiar shape.
How people make hearts, and the mediums they are shared through, have shifted as new technologies have emerged. As the internet age dawned in the s, heartlike images constructed with letters and numbers began catching on in AOL chat rooms. In the s, a red heart was one of the first emoji developed. Over the past decade, as social media has become increasingly visual with photos and videos, teenagers have used their hands and bodies to fashion heart symbols to post on Instagram and TikTok.
In AOL chat rooms in the s, text ruled. So people found ways to make hearts through the keys available on their keyboards. The keys had been used since the days of typewriters to depict the symbol, said Parker Higgins, an artist and activist who has studied the history of text encoding. AOL also popularized a new type of art made with standard text, such as semicolons, commas and dashes, to create images known as ASCII pronounced ass-key.
These images could portray a shrug or a rose in a single line. But they could also take up dozens of lines to depict elaborate hearts with arrows piercing them or roses woven in. Teenagers had to be in the know to successfully clip and save those hearts, and new ones were constantly being created, Higgins said. As mobile phones became popular earlier this century, emoji β small images that could appear alongside text β were born.
Among the first to be drawn was a red heart, created in by a Japanese artist, Shigetaka Kurita. Heart emoji did not become widely available until when a Google software team petitioned to get emoji recognized by the Unicode Consortium, a nonprofit that functions like the United Nations in maintaining text standards across computers.
