The death of the smiley?

Author Vladimir Nabokov said in a 1969 New York Times interview that "there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile -- some sort of concave mark, a supine round bracket".

Now, nearly four decades later, there is just such a typographical symbol -- :-), or :) for the minimalists, and it'd be tough to find a tech-savvy person who hasn't leaned on it. There's also a special typographical symbol for a frown -- :-( -- and one for a cool dude in sunglasses -- B-) -- and one for a wink -- ;-). There's even a typographical sign for wearing a baseball cap -- d=D.

These are emoticons (or emotive icons), the arrangements of letters and symbols that have been inserted into emails, message board posts and instant messages since the fledgling days of the Internet. 'Fledgling days', in this case, refers not to the mid-90s when people were beginning to learn what AOL was, but to the early 80s, when accessing the Internet was largely limited to research universities and defence contractors.

But the Internet is changing, and typing is no longer the only way to communicate online. With the onset of new technologies that facilitate, for example, a more graphic representation of moods, tone and inference, it's arguable that there could be frowns in the emoticon's future.

After all, the phenomenon is about to turn 25 -- a dinosaur in Web years. The origin of the ASCII smiley face is typically traced to September 1982, when Scott Fahlman, a research professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Department of Computer Science, suggested that the :-) symbol be used in the subject line of an online bulletin board post to denote a humorous or non-serious topic.

"Nobody ever guessed that this would catch on. I certainly didn't," said Fahlman, who is still on the faculty at Carnegie Mellon. But as he recounted, the trend spread, initially to other Internet-pioneering universities like Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and then beyond.

"As the Internet grew, it escaped this little closed community of computer scientists and made it into first other universities, a much larger group, and then out into the general public," Fahlman said. "It's been interesting to see [smiley faces] trickle from place to place, and now it's showing up in postings from Russia and China and all over the world. It's been fun to watch that."

Essentially, the emoticon proliferated along with the Internet itself.

"For people who first get into it, it's like they know the password to the secret club," Fahlman said. But now that emoticons have spread into every niche of Net culture and morphed into myriad (arguably irritating) spinoffs, that sense of exclusivity has lost some of its lustre. "It's kind of pathetic when the 'in group' is sort of half the world," Fahlman observed. "But originally, people were using these because it was some cool thing and it showed that you were a real expert user of the Internet, that you knew the secret language."

Of course, the vicissitudes of human taste have it that there's almost guaranteed to be a backlash against any trend, and emoticons were no exception. "I tried to fight [using emoticons] for a long time," confessed C.C. Chapman, vice president of new marketing at the new-media marketing agency Crayon.

"Then I just realised it was easier to showcase emotion [with emoticons]... Sometimes tone, and sarcasm especially, can be taken completely wrong in email depending on who's reading it," he said.

Nevertheless, Chapman acknowledged the presence of emoticon overkill. "I'm glad the super-customisation of them went away," he said, referring to the extensive lexicon of representations for hangovers, black eyes or Elvis haircuts. You don't see those used a whole lot these days, Chapman said. "It's reverted back to the simple smiles and frowns."

While simple frowns, winks and smiles have proven to have lasting power beyond their more complex counterparts, emoticons have nevertheless evolved. Most message board and instant-messaging client features now automatically convert them into cartoons or animated faces. AOL, which inaugurated its Buddy List feature in 1996 and the free AOL Instant Messenger software in 1997, has been converting ASCII emoticons to cartoon smileys since 1998, according to spokeswoman Erin Gifford.