The First Smiley
Online culture gained a small yet defining tradition in 1982 when Scott Fahlman at Carnegie Mellon University suggested using :-) and :-( to separate humor from serious remarks. A student had joked about a mercury spill in a campus elevator and readers took it literally. Fahlman proposed the symbols to restore clarity and the symbols moved through early networks. The first smiley stands as an early leap toward emotional signaling and shapes the challenge for modern AI systems as they generate tone and sentiment in ways guided by the long effort to help computers reflect human feeling.
Further Reading
Camil Smith, Emoji with the emo, 2022. CC BY-SA.