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PROFESSOR FAHLMAN, COMPUTER SCIENTIST AND ‘INVENTOR’ OF THE EMOTICON
Professor Fahlman realises that it’s the very idea of the emoticon which most people object to, saying good writers should have no need to explicitly label their comments. Shakespeare, for example, managed fine without them.
To a large degree, Fahlman agrees with these critics.
He says, ‘Perhaps the smiley face has done more to degrade communication than to improve it.’ However, he goes on to defend the idea of the emoticon by pointing out that ‘we’re talking about casual writing online, not great literature printed in one-way media and relatively inaccessible to the public.’
He goes on to say that ‘the great authors published their words in a different medium. If 100 000 copies of a novel were distributed in printed form, and 1% of the readers didn’t get the joke and were outraged at what they read, there was nothing these readers could do to spoil the enjoyment of the 99%.
However, if it were possible for each of the 1 000 clueless readers to write a criticism of the novel and publish it in the same distribution channels as the original work, imagine the problems this would cause. ‘If the use of emoticons and, in particular, a smiley face , reduces this problem, maybe they are not a bad idea after all.’