Michael Kinsley is the latest high-profile journalist to make the shift from print to pixels, as the editor of Microsoft's new online magazine Slate. But he doesn't believe that the fundamental differences between the two media are that pronounced; Slate, he writes, "won't scream 'cyberspace,' but just suggest it with a wink."

I surmise that Kinsley was talking about winking in a purely metaphorical way, but of course in electronic discourse the winks are often a bit more literal, when they come in the form of a smiley — a string of punctuation marks that suggests a facial expression laid on its side. You can end your sentence with :-) to indicate a smile, with ;-) to indicate a wink, or with :-( to suggest a frown of unhappiness or displeasure.

Imaginative e-writers have come up with hundreds of these things, expressions that signal sourness, sleepiness, wryness, surprise, alarm, and so on. Sometimes they're called emoticons, a word that blends "emotion" and "icon." (It deserves to die horribly in a head-on collision with "infotainment.")

In its own small way, the smiley is as significant a sign of the revolutionary implications of digital media as anything else I can think of. After all, the repertory of Western punctuation has been pretty much fixed since the sixteenth century — a measly half-dozen or so marks to render all the tones and nuances that the human voice is capable of. Until now, that is, when their expressive power is augmented so dramatically that it's like moving from a quill pen to a high-powered workstation.

It's a pity earlier writers didn't have these devices at their disposal. The frownie would have been useful to Kafka in "The Metamorphosis":

Proust could have used a yawnie to emphasize the first sentence of Remembrance of Things Past:

For a long time, I went to bed early |-O

And with Jane Austen, of course, it would have been winkies all the way down:

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife ; -)

I can hear you Janeites getting shirty: surely she would never have stooped to such a device. Well, maybe not, so long as she was sending her words in print to an anonymous audience. But I suspect she would have given serious consideration to the expedient if she were planning to send the text in electronically to a list like rec.fiction, if only to spare herself the flames that would otherwise have come searing back over the Net.

To: Jane@chawton.uk
From: sparky123@aol.com
Subject: Universally Acknowledged . . . NOT!

Get real, Jane! "A truth universally acknowledged"? Have you done a poll on the subject? >:-<

Like most traditionalists, I've resisted using smileys in my email. It feels too much like tipping my hand: I flatter myself that I can convey my tone without any need of a key signature. But it has occurred to me that I may be denying myself a useful device out of a weakness for the same fond illusion that the inventors of the smiley were prey to, the notion that any mere marks can pin down the meaning of your words in an unambiguous way. Irony is a pervasive sensibility, which has a way of washing over any sea walls we put in its path. The other day I got a message from a friend who congratulated me in fulsome terms for having slipped out of a particularly disagreeable obligation. It had a winkie tacked to the end of it, but I could tell he meant that ironically, too.