2 Cute 4 Words
In Defense of the Smiley
First published in The Village
Voice, October 4, 1994
A spectre is haunting cyberspace, and it looks like this: :-).
That is to say, it looks like a cheerful face turned sideways
(have another look, I'll wait), whence its name (smiley), and
whence its primary function in the world of online textual discourse:
it adds a grin to statements whose humor or sarcasm might
otherwise be misread as fuel for yet another network-scorching
war of e-words. There are frowneys too :-(, and winkeys ;-), and
a host of other variations, known interchangeably as both smileys
and "emoticons" -- and all of them dedicated to the
proposition that e-mail, in its speed and spontaneity, is as much
a form of conversation as of writing. It is the basic smiling
smiley, however, that has proven the most useful and popular of
the emoticons, and it is that same goofily benign countenance
that seems now to haunt certain respected guardians of
net.culture, who have set out to exorcise the spectre through a
campaign of browbeating aimed at all net.citizens hapless enough
to avail themselves of this latest addition to the family of punctuation
marks.
They're spooked, in other words, though I only say so because
I am otherwise at a loss to explain why anyone would feel
compelled to beat their brow against such a handy and pacific device.
Certainly the antismiley camp's own arguments are no help in
dispelling the mystery. With the wearying predictability of
tenure-damaged English professors, emoticonoclasts invariably
deliver the same smug lecture whenever called upon to justify
their disdain. Writing is writing, they insist, and humans have
been using it successfully to convey humor and other emotional
flavors for centuries without resort to smileys. And dammit, they
add (raising their voices as the bell rings), if a prose style
free of such emotionally flavorful gewgaws was good enough for
Jonathan Swift and Charles Dickens, it's sure as hell good enough
for you wretched online heirs to the Great Tradition. Class
dismissed.
At which point, of course, their logic melts back into the
thin air from which it was spun, since as even we wretched heirs
know, Dean Swift et al. were hardly averse to reaching now and then
for that emotionally flavorful gewgaw known as the exclamation
point -- let alone for such fripperies as apostrophes, asterisks,
spaces between words, and other innovations unknown to humans
during the first wildly successful millennium or two of written
communication.
We are left wondering whether the smileyphobes haven't simply
lost sight of the historical dimension of writing altogether.
Writing is writing, to be sure; but writing is also language bound
to technology, and bound so tightly that changes in the
technology of writing have always altered the nature of
writing as well. Surely even the most heavily elbow-patched of
English professors recognize at this late date that the invention
of the printing press didn't simply create a new vessel into
which to pour the ageless wine of written words -- it radically
reorganized the social context, the psychological experience, and
in short the very meaning of writing and reading. Likewise, it is
surely no secret to anyone with a modem (the rest of you have my
word on it) that the spread of computer networks is currently
effecting changes in the nature of writing as sweeping as those
wrought by Gutenberg's gadget.
Which only makes the opposition to emoticons that much more
curious, for the leading lights of the antismiley campaign are
not in fact some modemless cabal of lo-tek book-sniffers, but some
of the hippest online observers of the networks' unfolding
effects on human culture. Neal Stephenson, Wired magazine
coverboy and author of the neocyberpunk classic "Snow
Crash," published his canonical antismiley screed
("Smiley's People") a year ago in The New Republic;
Mike Godwin, savvy legal counsel for the Electronic Frontier
Foundation, followed with a broadside in Wired a few months
later; and just three weeks ago, Peter H. Lewis, the New York
Times's ace Internet watcher, tacked smileys onto a list of
everything that is wrong with e-mail.
Why these otherwise sharp-eyed net.thinkers go myopic when
they look at smileys is indeed a mystery, but I'm willing at this
point to hazard a stab at the answer. As I said before: They're spooked.
They've seen a ghost, and it's the ghost of a print-based
cultural system in which trained intellectuals like themselves
(like me) have figured more exaltedly than we are going to in the
culture taking shape on the nets. The smiley may be just the
newest punctuation mark, after all, but it's also a new kind
of punctuation mark, and its novelty sends an unsettling signal to
us professional wordsmiths. Graphically thrusting the human
figure into the icon-free realm of alphabetic transparency, the
smiley serves notice that from now on writing will be more intimately
tied to the bodies that produce it -- more a matter of local,
social interactions than of highly crafted texts designed to
stand on their own.
We who craft texts for a living are not entirely unjustified,
therefore, in fearing the smiley's message, and I can hardly
blame my colleagues for wanting to browbeat the messenger. But in the
end that's all they're doing, and I for one see no percentage in
it. I'd rather try and find my place in the new culture as
gracefully as I can, and preferably with a :-).