Every now and then there is a debate about who and why invented emoticons. And for a long time the authorship of the most used emoticon remained a mystery, the combination “colon-dash-parenthesis”, which reversed by 90 degrees recalls a smile; and its opposite, the disapproving grimace, achieved simply by reversing the direction of the parenthesis.
The mystery is over in February 2002 when the results of a research conducted by Mike Jones were published, the Microsoft researcher who was convinced to verify the statement of a university professor who claimed to have invented it himself, the “smiley”. This research seems to have been very complicated, even technologically, because the ways of writing and storing texts on computers have changed a lot over time. A long time. To the point that the project was called Digital Coelacanth, from the name of some fish that swim in the depths of the sea. The document sought it dates back to 1982, the dawn of the Internet. In short, in that year, on September 19, Carnegie Mellon professor Scott Fahlman had actually written the following message: “I propose that the following combination of characters indicates a joke; for those who are not jokes it is enough to change the meaning of the parenthesis “. In fact, the second emoticon today does not indicate serious messages, but a grimace of disapproval or disappointment. But the former has truly become the most used emoticon in the world. Practically immediately, remembers the prof in a long commemorative post. The story is interesting not only for historical reasons, but because it helps us to better understand some mechanisms of the Internet that do not seem very different from then when the very few people who were online, they met and wrote on the Bulletin Boards, the BBs, forerunner of newsgroups, in turn forerunners of social networks.
The teacher says that then the problem was that when someone made a joke, it happened that someone did not understand it and then dozens of reply messages immediately arrived that took the first statement seriously; and in turn these generated others in response to the wrong answer and so on. And therefore due to the lack of humor of some, the conversation went crazy and there was no way to rewind the tape and start from the beginning (reminds you of something? If you frequented Twitter or Facebook it is not very different). in conclusion Scott Fahlman, a computer scientist still with Cnarnegie Mellon, tried to solve the problem as a computer scientist, adding an unmistakable symbol to the conversation that would indicate its true meaning. Someone objected that William Shakespeare or Mark Twain didn’t need smileys to make it clear that they had made a joke; and yet, the professor argues, Shakespeare and Twain did not live on the Net, they did not have social networks and if someone did not understand a joke, they had no way of doing damage, while today a misunderstood joke generates waves of useless tweets. 🙂
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