You don't think about that somebody has invented something as omnipresent as that, it's like "who invented oxygen?". But Scott Fahlman did it, though he's also a researcher in AI.
By the way, not so long ago a friend misunderstood something I wrote because I used colon-bracket instead of colon-dash-bracket. She simply did not recognize that as a smiley face. And I think the full icon is slightly clumsy to type, what the shift key being used for the first and last character, but not the middle one. So now I have a macro which types a few spaces and then the full smiley face. So I just hit control-right-bracket: :-)
When I first started on the Net, I was against them as many people are, they don't seem "literary" enough. But heck, most scribbles over the Net is *not* literature anyway, are they? They are more like conversation. And after somebody took a very risky joke literally back in 1997, I started using them.
If you think about it, it's just like conversation. If you are talking to a friend or two who you know well, you can make a tricky joke with a straight face. But if you're talking to a stranger, you aren't familiar with his sense of humor (or not), so you automatically smile when you do it, to show you're joking. The smiley face is exactly that, and it's a brilliant invention.
2 comments:
I like the idea of emoticons.
In my case, as I often comment on photos taken by my flickr friends, I usually add the (:-) or (;-) emoticon, as these will "defuse" the comment, should it be a bit too critical.
A sign of friendship.
(:-)
Yeah, it's more useful than a lot of people want to admit. Some of the things I say to people would make me sound like a jackass if I didn't use it. ;)
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