A few days ago, I posted on Twitter an entry about the origins of the smiley emoticon. I asked a member of my staff, Matthew Schwartz, to write a blog post on the anniversary of this event, and to offer his perspectives on it. His thoughts are below.
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Twenty-nine years ago this week, a computer scientist at Carnegie Melon University invented something that changed the online landscape forever. His tools? A keyboard and a healthy dose of whimsy. His creation? The smiley-face emoticon.
As they are wont to do, a gaggle of geeks was interacting on a computerized bulletin board system, speculating on what would happen to the contents of an elevator if its cable were cut. Someone asked about the fate of a helium balloon in free fall. Another asked what might happen to pigeons flying about in the falling elevator. Still another wondered how a popped helium balloon might affect the pitch of the pigeons’ cheeps. Finally a scientist brought the conversation away from pigeons: What happens if the careening elevator contains a lit candle and a drop of mercury?
Five hours later, a message was posted with the subject, “WARNING!” It read:
“Because of a recent physics experiment, the leftmost elevator has been contaminated with mercury. There is also some slight fire damage. Decontamination should be complete by 08:00 Friday.”
Several concerned scientists contacted the author of the message for more details, unaware that it was a joke. Thus the brains turned their attention toward a more pressing matter: the need for an online “joke marker.” Someone suggested putting an asterisk in the subject field of any message intended to be a joke. Another proposed the pound sign because “it looks like two lips with teeth showing between them. This is the expected result if someone actually laughs their head off.” Still another declared with utmost certitude that the ampersand is the funniest character on the keyboard, looking for all the world like “a jolly fat man in convulsions of laughter.”
Finally, on September 19, 1982, a scientist named Scott Fahlman offered an elegant (and, in retrospect, obvious) solution:
I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers:
:-)
Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark
things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use
:-(
The suggestion stuck. People started using it immediately, suggesting variations, and generally embracing the burgeoning medium of text-based emotional expression. This wasn’t the first time punctuation had been used to symbolize a smile – variants had appeared in some printed works in the 19th century, and had also been seen in some early science fiction – but this was the first time a specific smiley face construction actually gained traction.
Yet today, three decades later, the emoticon is already becoming an anachronism. Oh, it is still used in instant messengers and text messages, but it’s not needed anymore, and its days are numbered. Even now, when you type “ :-) ” into the instant messaging software of your choice, odds are you won’t see a traditional emoticon at all; most programs automatically convert those three characters into an amusing little yellow smiley face. Technology is rendering the character-based emoticon extinct.
And it makes sense that the emoticon would fade from the scene. It is a relic of an earlier age, of a communications technology that measured its speed in bits per second instead of today’s megabits per second.
Let’s put that in perspective: In 1982, most computer modems received data at a rate of 300 bits per second. (It takes eight bits to make one character.) Text scrolled onto the screen as it was received. Communication was almost entirely text-based, as it simply took too long to transmit images. And even with text, it would take 4.5 hours to transmit your average 100,000 word novel.
Today, Verizon’s slowest FiOS Internet service comes into your home at 15 megabits per second – fifty thousand times faster than the modems in use when the smiley emoticon was invented. (A megabit is one million bits.) At these speeds, our novel would arrive in about one third of one second.
Verizon’s fastest service currently available is ten times faster, at 150 megabits per second. That same book would blink into existence, fully formed, in 0.03 seconds. (That’s faster than you could start and stop the stopwatch to time it.)
Dr. Fahlman and the rest of the CMU scientists were concerned about replacing body language and tone-of-voice cues lost when conversing in text. But with all of today’s available bandwidth, body language need not be lost. Text is just one of the many communication options available. And even a high-definition Skype video chat only uses about 1.5 megabits per second – leaving plenty of bandwidth for other applications.
Last week, a video of two grandparents trying to work their new webcam went viral. While the grandmother pensively tries to figure out how to take a picture, her husband makes monkey faces at the camera. “That’s a pretty good monkey,” he says, admiring his visage. The two continue being playful with each other, wondering why the picture won’t take, until they realize they’ve been recording a video the whole time. The video is adorable – and at its full resolution, requires about 0.5 megabits per second to view. Completely impossible on early modems; barely noticeable on today’s connections.
The quaint emoticon has its charms, but it simply cannot compete with something like this.
Twenty-nine years ago the text-based smiley face emoticon sprang into existence, bound for a long and prosperous life at the fingers of eager early adopters. Although today it is fading into obsolescence in the face of everything from graphical smileys to actual smiles, it rightly holds a special place in history as one of the first major constructions to bring personality to the Internet. For that, it should be celebrated.
Matthew Schwartz, a graduate of Georgetown Law, works in Internet and Technology Policy for Verizon.