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The First Smiley :-)
An anonymous reader points to this excellent bit of online archaeology -- Mike Jones' effort to find the first online smiley. A bit from the site: "After a significant effort to locate it, on September 10, 2002 the original post made by Scott Fahlman on CMU CS general bboard was retrieved by Jeff Baird from an October 1982 backup tape of the spice vax (cmu-750x)." Interesting methodology and a lot of work went into the search -- shades of the Dead Media Project.
Scott's a great guy -- he gave me my first hacking job! -- but he's got a lot to answer for with this one...
It's kind of exciting that, with the modern time-scale, we can actually trace things like this to their originator. It's the like that age old question: "All I want to know is who the man is that looked at a cow and said 'I think I drink from whatever comes out of those things when I squeeze them.'" I always sort of assumed that the smiley would become much like the milk - of amorphous origins, but part of our culture nonetheless.
I very much agree. I still refuse to use "emoticon", instead relying on the types of things I first used on BBS's back in the very early 90's.
People I speak with on AIM still have to ask what <g> stands for.
I have added, over the years, some of my own, including <Laughter>, <Shudder>, and <Yawn>
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
Once upon a time, people didn't have lowercase and so could not use uppercase for emphasis or to mark the start of a sentence.
Once upon a time, people didn't write spaces between words in their text.
Once upon a time, people didn't have vowels to help distinguish words.
Once upon a time, people didn't have question marks or exclamation points to indicate interrogatives or imperatives.
Get over it. "The tone of their writing" is simply too unreliable a mechanism for conveying in print what body language does for us in person. Why is the smiley any more objectionable as punctuation than, say, the question mark?
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
That's Nabokov all right, inadvertently predicting the invention of the smiley 10 years in advance :). Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if it had occured to lots of people, and the smiley has a very long history, if only someone could be bothered to dig it up.
That's a heckuva piece of work, but the smiley appears to have been generated by parallel evolution. Several people seem to have come up with it independently. I first encountered it on Usenet around the same time period. I don't remember who it was who suggested it; all I remember is that it was a woman and hence couldn't have been Scott Fahlman.
Trademarks are not patents.
According to Fahlman's own page on the subject, there is the possibility that the smiley symbol was used by teletype operators way back in the day. However, there is no hard evidence of this occurring, and no web pages document it. As we all know, if a point has no web page supporting it, it can't be true. :-)
For more information, click here.
Typical slashdot.... Don't give microsoft credit. It's not Mike Jones from microsoft... it's just Mike Jones. If it was any other research house, i'm sure it would have been there. But what else do you expect from Slashdot? I suppose just posting it is a step in the right directection towards no bias news.
Geez, man. Lighten up. It's just some guy doing something he thought was cool. It's not a directive from Bill to seize the net.culture as MS's own. Just a friendly guy named Mike. Doing something cool. It's fun. Smile.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
"Books" and personal communications are different environments. Although I do (occasionally) use smileys it doesn't mean that I need to because I have no other way of expressing myself effectively. It simply means that for the particular communication in question I determine the smiley to be an effective method of quickly and easily clarifying meaning. While I could say "Just joking by the way!", a ";)" is just as effective.
Or perhaps I should compose all my correspondence in sonnet form, just to show I have an impressive "grasp of the written word".......
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Agreed. Humor in real life conversation is conveyed not only through words, but also through body language, tone, and context. In text, you have none of the first two, and the third can often be impaired.
/. or IM :-)
While we're at it, we should add a flashing "Applause" sign to the writers toolchest!
IOW: We should stop blatantly telling the reader how to feel, and rather improve the writing to convey the emotion. This is of course wrt real writing, rather than droning on
So much in most languages, certianly English, relies on tone. This is something that simply cannot be conveyed through text. In something like a novel you can take the time to rewrite things such that the language truly indicates what you mean to convey, and you also have teh benefit of speaking about a character's actions (eg. "And that was smart", Jim remarked with a smirk). With realtime communiactions you have no such advantages. YOu have to come up with your response quickly, and have little ability to comment on them. A simley is sucha device. YOu can indicate the general intended tone of a remark. I can think of many phrases that I would use that could mean many different things depending on how I said them. For example:
:) would let them know that I am just kidding and playing with them.
"Well you reall screwed that up."
Now if I said that in a jovial, joking, manner, it would mean that I'm kidding, you really didn't screw up that bad, I'm just harassing you. If I said that in a neutral, professional tone, it woul be a comment, that you did indeed mess something up. If I yelled that, it would eman that not only did you do it, but it pissed me off personally.
While I can't truly convery that in a qucik text message, smileys can help. If I just typed it as is, it would probably be intereprted in the neutral sense I spoke of, and the person would believe that I was really indicating that I believed they ahd sincerely screwed up. Adding a
Well, skilled writers can still do that. Not everybody is a skilled writer, or has the time to read and re-read what they have written to ensure that the emotion will come across. Much also depends on the context in which the reader reads the text. Look at the thread in which the smiley was first proposed (it's linked from the article); it's evident that the discussion was also about what was and was not a joke. Sometimes, especially with deadpan humour, it's not at all obvious.
For readers whose first language is not that in which the text is composed it can be very helpful to have the context signalled like this. Even for me, an English speaker from the UK, occasionally I value a smiley if reading something from the US, since I don't have all the cultural references in common with the writer.
Text doesn't have tone of voice, of course, so what exactly is wrong with developing conventions that convey some of the non-verbal signals that would normally be expressed in conversational language?
In summary - if you don't like smileys, leave those of us who do alone, ok?
Anna B :)