Smiley happy people

I'm feeling middle aged. In fact, I'm just about as old as the smiley face, first designed by one Harvey Ball in 1963 whilst working as a freelance artist for a life assurance company. Like me, the smiley has irritated people ever since, although unlike me, the smiley symbol has become known to millions, both in its original form and as in its online incarnation as the emoticon :-) or :), along with countless variations on the theme.

As far back as 1993, Neal Stephenson was waging war against the unstoppable tide of emoticons. I fear it's a lost battle, but like the Spartans at Thermopylae, at least Stephenson had a few choice and pithy words to say before being overwhelmed:

The online world has its own cliches and truisms, none so haggard as the belief that reliable written communication is impossible without frequent use of emoticons, better known as the "smileys." Emoticons are nothing more than characters that look like a face when viewed sideways. The original smiley is :-), but there are innumerable variations, such as :-0 ;-) :-( 8-) :-{) :-{)>, and each can signify anything from facial hair to a particular emotional state. Emoticons are the electronic equivalent of spin doctors: commonly inserted at the end of a sentence that is meant to be interpreted as sarcasm, or, in general, whenever the writer fears his or her prose may be about to jump the iron rails of literalism.
With the eerie uniformity of airport cultists, emoticon users all proffer the same rationale for the smiley tic: since the streams of ascii characters flowing across the Internet (usually described as "cold," "mechanistic," etc.) cannot carry body language or tone, the missing cues must be supplied through punctuation. The tendency of writers to bungle their attempts at sarcasm, and of readers to bungle the detection of it, invariably leads (so the argument goes) to hurt feelings, which in turn leads to network "flame wars" in which people insult each other in extravagant terms that would never be used face- to-face. Irony, it seems, is like nitroglycerin: too tricky to be good for much, and so best left in the hands of fanatics or trained professionals.
Never addressed by such people is the question of how humans have managed to communicate with the written word for thousands of years without strewing crudely fashioned ideograms across their parchments. It is as if the written word were a cutting-edge technology without useful precedents. Some hackers actually go so far as to maintain, with a straight face (:-I), that words on a computer screen are different from words on paper--implying that writers of e-mail have nothing useful to learn from Dickens or Hemingway, and that time spent reading old books might be better spent coming up with new emoticons.

Splendid stuff -read Stephenson's article in full here.