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.

Comments

may god forgive him for what he has unleashed

[Jamie Zawinski]

Scott's a great guy -- he gave me my first hacking job! -- but he's got a lot to answer for with this one...

"The smiley is an attack on writers and readers alike. If it is funny, it doesn't need a smiley. If is not funny, a smiley won't help it. The smiley teaches writers that anything they write will pass as humor as long as it is punctuated properly. It teaches readers that they must ignore their better judgment, and look only at punctuation to determine intent." -- Jim Showalter

Re:may god forgive him for what he has unleashed

[gilroy]

Blockquoth the poster, quoting Jim Showalter:

It teaches readers that they must ignore their better judgment, and look only at punctuation to determine intent

I understand completely. That's why, when I tell a joke, I make sure to do it in a total monotone, completely deadpan. That way I don't accidentally teach my audience to ignore their better judgment or to rely on body language.

Oh, in case it wasm't clear: :)

Re:may god forgive him for what he has unleashed

[gilroy]

The smiley teaches writers that anything they write will pass as humor as long as it is punctuated properly. It teaches readers that they must ignore their better judgment, and look only at punctuation to determine intent.

Adding even more, it also makes sense that we should not use commas to indicate pauses -- or periods for sentence stops -- since that should be clear from context. We wouldn't want readers coming to rely upon mere punctuation, now would we?

Re:may god forgive him for what he has unleashed

[EvlG]

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.

The simely is one of the few universally recognized ways to do this - it breaks language barriers even!

What more could we ask for from 2 simple characters?

Strange.

[neksys]

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.

Re:First smiley?

[gilroy]

Blockquoth the poster:

Once upon a time, people could communicate emotions effectively simply through the tone of their writing.

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?

Precursor to smiley in 1973

[Broccolist]

Ha. I've never seen this mentioned anywhere else on the Internet, but interestingly enough, the smiley occured to the author Vladimir Nabokov (known for the novel Lolita, which incidentally rules) back in 1973. I was reading a book of interviews with him (Strong Opinions) and I started when I saw this bit:

[asked how he would rank himself among great writers]
I often think there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile -- some sort of concave mark, a supine round bracket, which I would now like to trace in reply to your question.

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.

"Need" is a strong word.

[Chuck Chunder]

"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".......

I rather disagree

[Sycraft-fu]

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:

"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 :) would let them know that I am just kidding and playing with them.