Smiley's people (essay)

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

"Smiley's people" is an essay 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 an allusion to the John le Carré novel, Smiley's People. The article contends that the popular use of emoticons in online communication lowers the quality of the written word. 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 (a theme Stephenson revisited in his 2008 novel Anathem).

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, "Smileys: Fahlman 1, Stephenson 0"

External links

Smileys: Fahlman 1, Stephenson 0, archived from the original on 2008-01-21 : Why Neal Stephenson no longer agrees with that article.

Works by Neal Stephenson

Novels

The Big U (1984) Zodiac (1988) Snow Crash (1992) The Diamond Age (1995) Cryptonomicon (1999) Anathem (2008) The Mongoliad (2010) Reamde (2011) Seveneves (2015)

Stephen Bury	Interface (1994) The Cobweb (1996)

The Baroque Cycle	Quicksilver (2003) The Confusion (2004) The System of the World (2004)

Short stories

"Spew" (1994)
"The Great Simoleon Caper" (1995)
"Excerpt from the Third and Last Volume of Tribes of the Pacific Northwest" (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)
Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing (2012)

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