March 18, 2007
The history of Smiley. From cool to uncool
News.com reports on the origins of the "smiley" on the Internet and it's spreading to other forms of communication, like IM and SMS - and how it's gone from "cool" to "uncool". :-(
"It'd be tough to find a tech-savvy person who hasn't leaned on it.; he typographical symbol-- :-), or :) for the minimalists, expressing a smile when typing.
..."The phenomenon is about to turn 25--a dinosaur in Web years. The origin of the ASCII smiley face is typically traced to September 1982, when Scott Fahlman, a research professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Department of Computer Science, suggested that the :-) symbol be used in the subject line of an online bulletin board post to denote a humorous or non-serious topic.
"Nobody ever guessed that this would catch on. I certainly didn't," said Fahlman. But as he recounted, the trend spread, initially to other Internet-pioneering universities like Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and then beyond.
"As the Internet grew, it escaped this little closed community of computer scientists and made it into first other universities, a much larger group, and then out into the general public," Fahlman said. "It's been interesting to see (smiley faces) trickle from place to place, and now it's showing up in postings from Russia and China and all over the world. It's been fun to watch that."
Essentially, the emoticon proliferated along with the Internet itself.
"For people who first get into it, it's like they know the password to the secret club," Fahlman said. But now that emoticons have spread into every niche of Net culture and morphed into myriad (arguably irritating) spinoffs, that sense of exclusivity has lost some of its luster.
"It's kind of pathetic when the 'in group' is sort of half the world," Fahlman observed. "But originally, people were using these because it was some cool thing and it showed that you were a real expert user of the Internet, that you knew the secret language."
Of course, the vicissitudes of human taste have it that there's almost guaranteed to be a backlash against any trend, and emoticons were no exception. "
The Permanent Link to this page is: http://www.textually.org/textually/archives/2007/03/015348.htm