You idiot! Just kidding ;-)
By Patrick Kelley
Originally published 09:53 a.m., September 22, 2007
Updated 09:53 a.m., September 22, 2007
Scott Fahlman deserves a place in the history of the information age — whether Fahlman will be remembered kindly is for history to decide.
It is Fahlman’s belief — and no one has stepped forward to contradict him — that he invented the first and most prevalent emoticon, the smiley, which is typed thus: :-).
Fahlman, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, says he created the smiley 25 years ago this week — at 11:44 a.m. Sept. 19, 1982, to be precise — when he posted the following message on a computer bulletin board:
I propose the following character sequence for joke markers: :-). Read it sideways.
His message was part of a serious discussion about how to communicate clearly by computer. Computer scientists, early adopters of e-mail and linguists had raised this question: How can the full meaning of a message be made clear when the recipient cannot see the facial expression and bodily movements of the sender? Without those silent cues, the argument went, the meaning of the simplest statement could be misconstrued.
In such a situation, humor could be downright dangerous if it was not clearly labeled. Fahlman was proposing a simple label for jokes.
Since the beginnings of e-mail, consultants have collected high fees by warning insecure executives of the dangers of including jokes in business communications. Those consultants have contributed to a piece of info-age conventional wisdom: Humor, especially irony, is too easily misunderstood in computer communications and should be avoided at all costs.
The consultants had the wrong end of the stick. So did the scientists, linguists and e-mailers. The problem is not that computers are somehow hostile to humor, but that too many people just cannot tell a joke to save their souls and that too many other people cannot read well enough to discern a joke when they see one on the screen.
After all, what is a computer screen but a hideously expensive sheet of infinitely reusable paper? The words that appear on the screen are ordinary words.
People have been sending each other written and typed jokes by messenger and mail for many years. Writers — Mark Twain comes to mind — have based successful careers on the assumption that a reader of ordinary intelligence could spot a joke on a printed page without explanatory footnotes or parenthetical comments (That’s a joke, son!). Mark Twain would communicate just fine on the Internet today with nary a :-) or an LOL (laughing out loud).
True, some writers have always been insecure when it comes to humor. Generations of adolescent girls beat Fahlman to the punch by larding their letters and puppy-love notes with little hand-drawn smiley faces. Those hand-drawn smileys could melt an adolescent boy’s heart in a way no :-) ever will.
Perhaps Fahlman’s smiley has a purpose on the screen, just as the girls’ smileys had a purpose in their sweetly scented letters.
But the computer smiley has done something the hand-drawn version never did. It has multiplied and mutated into dozens of forms, from sly winks ;-) to angry grimaces >:-[ to expressions of outright terror =:-0. Among the emoticons and Internet and instant-messaging shorthand — LOL, PRW (parents are watching) and so forth — complex ideas and emotions are being converted into bland common code.
Soon, nobody will be able to write a real joke or express a real emotion at all.