The Invetion of the Smiley Face

[TWTCommish]

Check this out:

http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a4_031.html

Just thought you'd all find it interesting, since the smiley is a major part of our lives here at SitePoint.

[Peter Hibbit]

There's a bit in a book called 'Wizards who never sleep" about the guy that first suggested the internet smilies. I'll dig it out tomorrow and post it.

[Vincent Puglia]

Hi Chris,

Evidently they never saw Forest Gump

Vinny

[Peter Hibbit]

Morning! (well it is to me)

Here's that bit I promised you. It's from a book called "Where wizards stay up late." by Katie Hafner & Matthew Lyon. It's about the creation of the Internet.

On April 12th, 1979, a rank newcomer to the MsgGroup named Kevin MacKenzie anguished openly about the 'loss of meaning' in this electronic, textually bound medium. Unquestionably, e-mail allowed a spontaneous verbal exchange, but he was troubled by its inability to convey human gestures, facial expressions, and tone of voice - all of which come naturally when talking and express a whole vocabulary of nuances in speech and thought, including irony and sarcasm. Perhaps, he said, we could extend the set of punctuation in e-mail messages. In order to indicate that a particular sentence is meant to be tongue-in-cheek, he proposed inserting a hyphen and parenthesis at the end of the sentence, thus :-).

MacKenzie confessed that the idea wasn't entirely his; it had been sparked by something he had read on a different subject in an old copy of 'The Reader's Digest'. About an hour later, he was flamed, or rather, singed. He was told his suggestion was 'naive but not stupid'. He was given a short lecture on Shakespeare's mastery of the language without auxillary notation. 'Those who will not learn to use this instrument well cannot be saved by an expanded alphabet; they will only inflict us with expanded gibberish.'

What did Shakespeare know?

Peter