BKSMILEY.RVW 930506 O'Reilly and Associates, Inc. 103 Morris St., Suite A Sebastopol, CA 95472-9902 800-338-6887 fax: 707-829-0104 info@ora.com Smileys, David W. Sanderson (dws@ora.com) and Dale Dougherty, 1993, 1-56592-041-4 "Smileys", otherwise known as "emoticons" (emotive icons), are the "body language" and "intonation" of electronic mail. It is tremendously easy, when using email or bulletin board type communications, to say something which you consider to be a minor and flippant aside, and have it come across as a deadly insult. Hence the "smiley" :-) a set of characters which forms a "happy face" (view it sideways) to indicate that the writer is joking. David Sanderson has compiled an enormous list of these "typewriter faces" since there are many variations on the basic smiley above. To the basic "happy" :-) , one can add sad :-( , apathetic or stern :-| and "cool dude wearing shades" B-) (which also works as a "Batman" caricature). A great number of the examples give in the book fall into the "caricature" category, and are fun, if not terribly useful. (This used to be a popular pastime at both UBC and SFU: generating new caricatures and characters.) As well as the enormous list of smileys contained in the book, pages 41 to 44 present you with an assortment of games using emoticons. "Where's Smiley", on page 42, will be immediately recognizable as a section of UUENCODEd material. The fact that "smileys" pop up inadvertantly in miscellaneous material was the source of a humourous note recently on alt.folklore.computers in which a programmer lamented that his C code was grinning at him {: The explanatory text is minimal. It does explain that smileys are used to convey emotion; and particularly the fact that a particular statement is made in jest. Pages 24 and 25 begin to explore the fact that electronic communication is fraught with peril for misunderstanding, but do not explore it in great depth. Page 26 warns against overuse of emoticons, but nowhere is the reader warned against the all too common practice of sending a truly abusive message with some smileys attached. Had the book some more serious material, I would not hesitate to recommend that it be standard practice for corporations to issue a copy to every new user given an email account. As it is, the book is a highly amusing piece with the potential to be used as a lead in to more serious discussion. copyright Robert M. Slade, 1993 BKSMILEY.RVW 930506 (Post scriptum: commenting on the original draft of this review, David Sanderson has stated that he plans to expand the next edition to include much more discussion of the etiquette and culture of email.) ====================== DECUS Canada Communications, Desktop, Education and Security group newsletters Editor and/or reviewer ROBERTS@decus.ca, RSlade@sfu.ca, Rob Slade at 1:153/733 Author "Robert Slade's Guide to Computer Viruses" (Oct. '94) Springer-Verlag