Q&A with Mr. Smiley himself

Posted July 10th, 2007 at 9:54 am by Terrell Karlsten, Yahoo! Messenger

 7 Comments / Filed in: Behind the Scenes, Guest Opinions

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the emoticon (or smiley face) used in online communications, including email and IM. Yahoo! Messenger, widely known for its fun, animated emoticons, is celebrating this milestone with an “emoticontest” (more later) and sat down with Carnegie Mellon University Professor Scott Fahlman, who is credited with inventing the text smiley in the US. For all you Internet historians, read on to learn about the history and evolution of the emoticon.

Q. You are credited as the first person to use the text smiley face :-) in electronic communications, specifically online bulletin boards. How did you come up with the idea and what was its initial purpose?

In the early 1980’s, the computer science community at Carnegie Mellon was beginning to make heavy use of online bulletin boards or “bboards” – the primitive ancestors of online newsgroups and, much later, of blogs. Many of the posts were serious – talk announcements, requests for information – while other posts discussed topics of general interest, ranging from politics to abortion to campus parking.

Given the nature of the community, we also had a number of posts that were humorous (or attempts at humor). The problem was that if someone made a sarcastic remark, a few readers would fail to get the joke. In some cases, they would respond angrily to what (they thought) the post was saying. This often led to “flame wars”: lengthy arguments that would bury the original thread of the discussion.

Someone proposed that the only way to prevent this, short of banishing all these clueless people from our midst, was to invent some sort of marker that could be put in a post’s subject line to indicate that the post was meant to be sarcastic and should not be taken seriously. But in those days, all we had was the ASCII character set, and nobody could come up with a short sequence of characters that conveyed the desired meaning. And then it occurred to me that the character sequence :-) looked like a grinning face if the reader turned his or her head sideways.

So I posted a very brief note on a Carnegie Mellon bboard proposing that we use :-) as the joke marker, and :-( as the “I’m not kidding” marker, though the latter soon evolved into a marker for unhappiness or anger. I tossed this off in about five minutes, not even bothering to proofread the note or save a copy. And things took off from there.

Q. How did people react to the smiley when you first used it? How much time passed before people started to adopt the smiley?

Those who were participating in the local bboard discussion about a joke marker liked the :-) idea and picked it up at once for their posts and Email. From there it quickly spread to other research universities via the Arpanet – the ancestor of today’s internet. Within a few months I started seeing lists with dozens of “smilies” including open-mouthed surprise, person wearing glasses, Abraham Lincoln, Santa Claus, the Pope, and so on. For a few people, creating and compiling these complex text-string smilies (later dubbed “emoticons” by someone) became a serious hobby.

Q. Was there a specific point in time when you realized you created something that would take off the way that this did?

This idea spread very quickly through the few universities and hi-tech companies that were on the old Arpanet. It was gratifying that my colleagues found the idea so amusing, but I figured that it would stop there and would gradually fade away as the novelty wore off.

It did stop there for quite a while, though it never faded away. The Arpanet evolved into the Internet. First it spread to other universities and companies, gradually it began to spread to research groups outside of the United States, and in the 1990s the Internet quickly spread into the homes of average citizens. And as each new group got access to Email and newsgroups and blogs, they began to see the smiley faces. Many of them adopted this idea, either because they found it amusing or they considered it a badge of membership in the computer-savvy community.

This second phase occurred so gradually that it was almost invisible to me. So I didn’t realize that the smiley had turned into a long-lasting, worldwide phenomenon until years later, when the mainstream media started writing stories about it.

Q. What’s the most interesting thing that has happened to you since being acknowledged as the creator of smileys?

There have been a lot of little moments when friends and acquaintances have learned that I’m “that guy”, and their jaw-dropping reactions (or sometimes outright disbelief) have been fun to watch. The press coverage has come in waves: someone at a local paper will do a story, AP will pick it up, and two weeks later I’m on the phone with some reporter from Finland or New Zealand.

One interesting moment was when the Wall Street Journal did a story on this. Several members of my family have been successful in business, and I was always (jokingly) called the black sheep of the family for going into something as impractical as artificial intelligence research. So guess which member of the clan was the first to get his name on the front page of the WSJ – for some silly thing I tossed off in five minutes.

Q. You’ve shared that you are not a big fan of the newer animated emoticons. However, if you were to create a new emoticon today to express any emotion, what would it be?

I’ve been a fan of Edvard Munch’s painting “The Scream.” It would be nice to have a smiley that captures that emotion as well as Munch did. When deadlines are looming and things are going wrong, I’d use that symbol about six times a day. The :-( symbol just doesn’t capture the full horror of discovering that your Internet connection just went down, an hour before the deadline for submitting a major funding proposal.

Q. What do you think is the future of the emoticon?

It’s surprising to me that people still use these things – they were very much a product of the limited character sets that we had in the 1980’s. But they’re quick, convenient, versatile, and occasionally clever, so maybe they’ll live on even in a world where we all have access to graphics and voice and video in our messages. Of course, if written communication dies out altogether, as some have predicted, then the emoticon will die with it, but I don’t expect to see that.

Q. Have you heard any unusual tales of where smileys have been used in particularly tense situations? Between world leaders, for example, where body language is important?

I’ve never heard of a smiley being used in a message between world leaders or in an international treaty. But back in the 1990’s, when the Soviet Union was breaking up and everyone feared a coup, I saw some messages from people in Moscow to their friends in the West with news that they were still OK and that things were not quite as scary as they appeared to be in news reports. Some of those messages had smiley faces, signifying relief and reassurance rather than “this is just a joke”. That was one of the few times when I’ve felt real pride in helping to create this thing.

Q. Do you think emoticons are over-used?

Sometimes. When people first discover this idea, they tend to got nuts for a while – just as they do when they discover that they can put a dozen colors and a hundred fonts in a single document. That’s annoying to those of us who have been using Email for decades and who no longer are thrilled by all the possibilities. These people are trying to show that they’re part of the “in group”, but by over-doing it they actually label themselves as “newbies”. But most people soon outgrow this phase and settle down, only using an occasional smiley or frowny face where it makes some kind of sense to do so.

Some people feel that the emoticon has no place in good writing. True, an emoticon can take the place of the facial expressions, body language, and tone of voice that we use in face-to-face communication, but it’s certainly possible to convey sarcasm or unhappiness in other ways. I always wonder whether these same people object to the exclamation mark – a typographical convention that has been in common use since the 1400’s. Like emoticons, exclamation marks are not really necessary to convey meaning: a good writer can find other ways to express excitement. But many writers do find them useful – and a few writers annoy us by using too many of them!!!

More details on Professor Fahlman’s involvement in the birth of the text smiley can be found here.

And don’t forget to enter the Yahoo! Messenger Emoticontest to be the new face of Yahoo! Messenger! Yahoo! Messenger will add six new animated emoticons to its service in the coming months. To enter Yahoo! Messenger’s Emoticontest, go here and submit a photo of a signature look or favorite expression. The Bix online community will vote on the submissions and determine the next generation of emoticons in Yahoo! Messenger. The contest is running in the U.S., India and Vietnam until July 31, 2007.

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7 Comments Add your own

Paul McNamara | July 10th, 2007 at 12:08 pm

Hi: If you just can’t get enough of emoticon lore, here’s another just-posted interview with Fahlman in which he discusses the anti-emoticon rhetoric of Penn Jillette, as well as the conversion of Si-Fi author Neal Stephenson from a critic to fan. The Yahoo contest gets a mention … and you can also vote in an emoticon poll:
http://www.networkworld.com/community/?q=node/17332

Srinath | July 10th, 2007 at 6:33 pm

nice

Dung Le Trung | July 16th, 2007 at 5:51 pm

Nice work! Thank you!

thianhoo | October 28th, 2007 at 12:32 pm

hia this is well cool but i dont get smileys

sandeep | November 14th, 2007 at 10:08 am

Nice to know, I am really a big fan of text smileys ;-)

Barb | January 1st, 2008 at 11:03 am

I think it would be awesome to have a emoticon that looks like he/she’s hangin on like a fence and looking for whoever is chatting. Also one that looks like they are knocking to get attention. They all are great, and my sisters and I enjoy them. Thanks too! Barb

BOGDAN | November 26th, 2008 at 2:44 pm

You can find a patch for big emoticons for the new version (9) and 8.1

http://www.ymlover.ro/big-smileys-for-yahoo-messenger-8/