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| From Technology Review, October 1995 The Shadow of Your Smiley . . . . . . . . . . . . . By David Brittan IN AN AGE WHEN letters are posted with a prayer, it is easy to suppose that languorous delivery is a permanent feature of the mail, like dog bites and battered leather bags. But it wasn't always so. When William Dockwra, a London entrepreneur, set up the first urban postal system—complete with local collection and delivery, prepaid mail, and postmarking—the mail came almost every hour. Letter carriers of the Penny Post, as it was called, made six to eight deliveries daily in central London and four in the rest of the city. The year was 1680. By the end of the nineteenth century, post offices in Berlin, Paris, and other European cities had begun gusting mail across town in underground pneumatic tubes. Philadelphia copied this system in 1893, laying a half-mile pair of tubes (one for each direction) that propelled bundles of mail in six-inch-wide canisters. New York followed suit with several miles of tubing that could move 360,000 letters per hour. This innovation produced excellent service wherever it was adopted. In the Milan of 1890, for example, mail was delivered five times a day. The science writer Charles C. Mann notes in Inc. Technology magazine (summer 1995) that this hyperkinetic schedule enabled the opera composer Giuseppe Verdi and his librettist, Arrigo Boito, to maintain a fruitful collaboration largely by post. When Verdi fired off a plot suggestion in the morning, he could expect to receive a reply, and even to answer the reply, before the day was out. Mann compares the letter mail of the 1890s to the email of the 1990s, and with evident justification. Correspondence was fast and spontaneous, a conversation in written form. And in the absence of body language and vocal inflection, the recipient had only words on paper by which to gauge the sender's mood or intent. The same can no doubt be said of the earlier Penny Post. All of which presents something of a mystery. Despite their resemblance to modern electronic communicators, the letter writers of yesteryear—whom I imagine to have scribbled mountains of hasty notes in anticipation of making the return mail—never once, to my knowledge, saw the need to resort to anything like a "smiley." Smileys, also known as emoticons, are a class of icons with which many email writers and online conversationalists attempt to label the "mood" of their words. Through clever typography—and the willingness of readers to tilt their heads to one side—it is possible to convey in a few keystrokes a reasonable facsimile of a smile :-), a frown :-(, or a wink ;-). And new emoticons are appearing all the time; a veritable cottage industry has devoted itself to their creation, dissemination, and emblazonment on T-shirts and mugs. To their proponents, smileys are indispensable for "clarifying meaning"—for avoiding the misunderstandings and flare-ups that can mar electronic dialogue. "When you speak to someone face to face or over the phone, changes in your tone of voice and gestures help convey your mood," notes an email guide for a major research institute. "These audio and visual cues are missing with email." Scott Fahlman, a Carnegie Mellon University computer scientist, assures me that the substitution of ersatz cues has had a calming effect: "Fewer fights start due to misunderstandings (saving people's energy for more interesting fights), and some people have fun with these things." Fahlman ought to know; he is credited with inventing the three basic smileys, in 1981. "I don't see a lot of downside," he concludes. Fahlman obviously isn't looking hard enough. Though aficionados will tell you that the glyphs can express hundreds of emotions, nearly all, like ]:-> (the devil) and :/7) (Cyrano de Bergerac), prove to be not so much emotional states as people with funny objects stuck to their heads. That leaves smiley, frowny, and winky to sum up the human condition. Among the icons that are actually serviceable, the cloying scent of 1970s have-a-nice-day-ism is hard to ignore: a smiley in a serious email message has the elegance of a bobbing hula doll in the back of a Rolls-Royce. Beyond mere bad taste, a movement is afoot to mandate the use of smileys—or similar eye-rolling, elbow-nudging devices for sucking all the subtlety and risk out of communicating—as a matter of "netiquette." The aforementioned email guide advises: "If you mean something as a joke, say so. You can do that by typing '(joke)' or '(grin)' or '(kidding!).' " An email handbook from an esteemed midwestern university warns: "Be aware of irony, humor, and satire. . . . Try to mark yours appropriately—the use of emoticons is one way to accomplish this." SUCH SANCTIMONIOUS poppycock might be forgiven if people were as inept, and email as radically novel, as the guidelines' authors imagine. On the first score we are to suppose that ordinary mortals are incapable of writing clearly, of detecting irony, and of surviving (and even learning from) misunderstandings. On the second, we are asked to believe that online communication leads those inarticulate souls into uncharted territory, a land of rapid banter where words will fail them and only their winkies afford protection. But this brave new world is as old as the Penny Post. Older. It was summoned into being whenever people of average literary ability, without recourse to "audio and visual cues," dashed off a few lines. It is in this world that we encounter the 80-year-old Verdi, mortified at having presented an autographed portrait to the wrong person. "In a fury," he wrote to a friend, "I took a revolver (it was made of chocolate) and fired it into my mouth. And I still live!!!" Somehow, even without the socially responsible smiley as a tip-off, Verdi's friend knew the old man was pulling his leg. The proven success of vernacular media says that many of today's online writers are selling themselves short. By relying on a handful of rubber-stamp "emotions," they deny themselves the challenge and the satisfaction of finding the right words. They also risk turning the online world into a poorer, less human place than it can be. Already, a senior executive of a financial services firm, writing in a national magazine, can say with a straight face: "At [my company] we have a rule: no one argues on email, and sarcasm is verboten." Granted, the late-twentieth-century fire sale on long-distance phone rates has made rusty correspondents of us all. But with the advent of email, opportunities to rediscover the power of the written word have never been greater. Perhaps it is time to stop making faces and learn how to communicate. db |