The Smiley
A reader's summary of the three-character face that was invented so that a joke on a computer screen would not be mistaken for a statement of fact.
The term at a glance
A smiley, or emoticon, is a short string of keyboard characters that looks like a face when the head is tilted to the left, the best known being :-) and its shorter cousin :). It is used in written messages to show tone, usually friendliness or humor. It differs from an emoji, which is a standardized picture rather than a string of punctuation, though the two do the same job and are often discussed together.
Origin
The usual date is September 19, 1982. On a computer-science bulletin board at Carnegie Mellon University, a thread had started over a joke about a mercury spill in an elevator. Some readers took the joke as a real warning, and others complained about the confusion. Scott Fahlman, a computer scientist at the university, suggested that jokes be marked with the sequence :-), read sideways, and that serious posts could carry :-(. The original post was thought to be lost until 2002, when it was recovered from old backup tapes. Earlier hints of the idea exist: Vladimir Nabokov said in a 1969 interview that there ought to be a typographical sign for a smile, a concave mark like a rounded bracket lying on its side, and other users are credited with using similar marks on networks before 1982. Fahlman's post is cited because it states the purpose clearly and because it spread.
History and context
The idea moved from university bulletin boards onto Usenet, email and the commercial services of the 1990s, and variants multiplied: winking, frowning, shocked and sideways-looking faces. In 1999, Shigetaka Kurita designed the first widely used emoji set, 176 small images for a Japanese mobile service, and the pictures later spread to other phones. The Unicode Consortium added emoji to the standard in 2010, and in 2015 Oxford Dictionaries named the “face with tears of joy” emoji its word of the year, choosing a picture where it had previously always chosen a word. The smiley also sits in the history of online friction: the early networks' habit of flame wars was one reason a joke-marker seemed useful, and the difficulty of telling a sincere view from a parody of it is the subject of Poe's Law.
Main ideas
Text arrives without a tone of voice
In speech, a smile, a pause or a lifted eyebrow tells the listener how to take a sentence. On a screen all of that is missing, so the same words can be a joke, a warning or an insult. The smiley is a small patch for that gap: a few characters standing in for the face the writer would have made.
The original smiley was a safety label
Fahlman did not propose :-) as decoration. He proposed it so that readers of a shared message board could tell a joke from a statement of fact, and offered :-( for the reverse. The job was to prevent misunderstanding, and the cheerful look came second.
Writers overestimate how clear they are
A 2005 study by Justin Kruger and colleagues had people send sentences by email, some of them sarcastic, and predict whether the reader would catch the tone. Senders expected to be understood about 78 percent of the time, and readers got it right about 56 percent. The sender hears the voice in their own head, and the reader does not.
Emoji turned a typed trick into a built-in keyboard
Shigetaka Kurita designed a set of 176 tiny pictures for NTT DoCoMo's mobile internet service in 1999. Emoji were added to the Unicode standard in 2010 and became a phone keyboard staple in the following years, so a reader on any device sees roughly the same picture. A typed smiley had to be read sideways; an emoji does not.
The marker can change the sentence it labels
A smiley after a sharp remark softens it, and the same face after a polite remark can make it read as sarcasm. Over the years, users have invented new markers for new needs, such as the "/s" tag for sarcasm, so the convention keeps being rebuilt whenever the old one stops carrying the intended signal.
Critique
- The effect is smaller than the folklore suggests. Early experimental work on emoticons found that they shifted how readers took a message only modestly, and that the words themselves counted for more. A smiley does not rescue a cruel sentence, and a warm sentence needs none.
- Meanings drift between groups. A face that reads as friendly to one age group can read as stiff, ironic or passive aggressive to another. The marker only works where both sides agree on the code, and online that agreement is local and changes quickly.
- It can become a habit with no content. Where a smiley ends every message, readers stop noticing it, and its absence starts to read as coldness. A device meant to prevent a misunderstanding then creates a new etiquette to get wrong.
Impact
Almost every messaging app now has a picker of small faces, and most users add a marker of tone without thinking about it. The practical lesson is the one in Fahlman's original post: writers know what they meant, readers only know what was written, and the cheapest fix for the gap is to say so out loud. Before sending a line that depends on its tone, it is worth asking whether a stranger reading it cold would take it the way you intend, and adding the marker if not.