Happy 29th Birthday to the Smiley Emoticon!

[url=ttp://www.cs.cmu.edu/smiley/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;]ttp://www.cs.cmu.edu/smiley/[/url]
HISTORY / Scott Fahlman

A lot of people have asked me about this, so I thought I’d put the information here, linked under my home page:
Yes, I am the inventor of the sideways “smiley face” (sometimes called an “emoticon”) that is commonly used in E-mail, chat, and newsgroup posts. Or at least I’m one of the inventors.

By the early 1980’s, the Computer Science community at Carnegie Mellon was making heavy use of online bulletin boards or “bboards”. These were a precursor of today’s newsgroups, and they were an important social mechanism in the department – a place where faculty, staff, and students could discuss the weighty matters of the day on an equal footing. Many of the posts were serious: talk announcements, requests for information, and things like “I’ve just found a ring in the fifth-floor men’s room. Who does it belong to?” Other posts discussed topics of general interest, ranging from politics to abortion to campus parking to keyboard layout (in increasing order of passion). Even in those days, extended “flame wars” were common.

Many people have denounced the very idea of the smiley face, pointing out that good writers should have no need to explicitly label their humorous comments. Shakespeare and Jonathan Swift and Mark Twain got along just fine without this. And by labeling the remarks that are not meant to be taken seriously, we spoil the joke. In satirical writing, half the fun is in never being quite sure whether the author is serious or not.

To a large degree, I agree with these critics. Perhaps the E-mail smiley face has done more to degrade our written communication than to improve it. But in defense of the idea, let me say two things:

First, not all people who post on boards have the literary skill of Shakespeare or Twain, and even those luminaries had bad days. Besides, Shakespeare’s work is full of clichés and his spelling was atrocious.

Second, and more important, these authors were publishing their words in a different medium, with different properties. If 100,000 copies of a novel or an essay were distributed in printed form, and if 1% of the readers didn’t get the joke and were outraged at what they had read, there was nothing these clueless readers could do to spoil the enjoyment of the other 99%. But if it were possible for each of the 1000 clueless readers to write a lengthy counter-argument and to flood these into the same distribution channels as the original work, and if others could then jump into the fray in similar fashion, you can see the problems that this would cause. If the judicious use of a few smilies can reduce the frequency of such firestorms, then maybe it’s not such a bad idea after all. Again, we’re talking here about casual writing on the Internet, not great works printed in one-way media that relatively inaccessible to the general public.

Read more here to find out how the lengths some went to in order to retrieve the original message - it'll take some of you back in time!

Kind of continuing in the vein of communication on the web, I found this set of stats which I thought interesting:
http://www.livescience.com/15867-intern ... uages.html


How long until Chinese speakers surpass English speakers?