Smiley's people

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For the John le Carré novel, see Smiley's People.

"Smiley's people" is an article by Neal Stephenson that appeared in The New Republic on September 13, 1993, on the subject of emoticons or "smileys". The title of the article is probably a reference to the John le Carré novel, Smiley's People, although it is capitalised differently. The article contends that the popular use of emoticons lowers the quality of the written word in the context of online communication. While he has since recanted this view, there remain many others who agree with his original assessment citing the general lack of written sophistication in modern public online communication.

[edit] Quote

When I was younger I wrote an opinion piece for The New Republic in which I denounced smileys (symbols like this :) ) and the people who used them in e-mail, including Scott Fahlman, who invented them.

...

For the record, I no longer agree with my own smileys editorial of 1993...
—Neal Stephenson

[edit] External links

• The original article
• Smileys: Fahlman 1, Stephenson 0 - Why Neal Stephenson no longer agrees with that article.

Works by Neal Stephenson
Full-Length Novels	The Big U (1984) | Zodiac (1988) | Snow Crash (1992) | Interface (1994) | The Diamond Age (1995) | The Cobweb (1996) | Cryptonomicon (1999) | The Baroque Cycle: Quicksilver (2003), The Confusion (2004), and The System of the World (2004)
Short Stories	"Spew" (1994) | "The Great Simoleon Caper" (1995) | "Jipi and the paranoid chip" (1997)
Non-Fiction	Smiley's people (1993) | In the Kingdom of Mao Bell (1994) | Mother Earth Mother Board (1996) | Global Neighborhood Watch (1998) | In the Beginning...was the Command Line (1999)