The Joke That Needed a Face

On September 19, 1982, at 11:44 in the morning, a computer scientist named Scott Fahlman typed a short message onto an online bulletin board at Carnegie Mellon University. Researchers there used the board to talk, argue, and joke, and a familiar problem kept happening: someone would post something in jest, a reader would take it literally, and a pointless argument would follow. Fahlman proposed a fix. "I propose," he wrote, "the following character sequence for joke markers: :-)". Read it sideways.

It was almost nothing, three punctuation marks. But it named and solved a real problem that had existed since the first written word: text carries the words and throws away the voice. In person, a raised eyebrow or a small smile tells you not to take a remark seriously. On the page, and especially on a fast, casual, typo-strewn message board, that signal is simply gone, and readers supply their own tone, often the wrong one.

Fahlman's little face put the missing signal back. It was a way to annotate text with the emotional information that speech carries for free. The :-) meant "this is a joke, relax," and its companion :-( meant "this is serious, or I'm not happy." Two tiny clusters of punctuation restored a whole channel of human communication that writing had been quietly dropping for thousands of years.

The design is worth admiring precisely because it is so cheap. It needed no new software, no new characters, no permission from anyone. It used keys already on every keyboard, arranged so that a human brain, which is extremely good at finding faces, would see a face. It spread because it cost nothing to adopt and solved something people actually felt. That is close to the ideal shape of a good tool.

The smiley, a distant descendant of Fahlman's three-character joke marker. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

From those three characters grew an entire visual language. The sideways smiley became the upright one, then the yellow graphic emoji, and now thousands of little pictures people use to soften, sharpen, and color plain text in nearly every message they send. A whole layer of modern communication rests on the problem Fahlman pointed at: writing needs a way to show tone, and for millennia it did not have one.

He has said, with good humor, that this is not the work he expected to be known for; the emoticon was a two-minute idea in the middle of a career spent on artificial intelligence. But the two-minute idea was a genuine invention. It saw a real gap, described it exactly, and closed it with the least possible material, which is harder and rarer than it looks.

The original message was thought lost for years, then recovered from old backup tapes in 2002. It reads like a footnote and works like a foundation. On September 19, 1982, someone noticed that text could not smile, and gave it a way to, and billions of people have been tilting their heads to read a punctuation face ever since.