The Language of "Smart" Phones
I really need to be working on a project so I'm going to make this quick.
I just came across an article that said that the word of the year for 2015 is the crying face smiley emoji. If you're like me, you're thinking: but that's not a word, that's a picture! And you would be right. But think about your texting habits. For some people this may not be true, but how often do you use emojis to add meaning to what you are saying, or send only an emoji as a reply to a message? I know that I do it to let people know that I'm joking, or to show that what I was just talking about is really annoying and how I'm sooo not impressed. (I was going to add emojis to show you what I mean, but then I realized that my computer doesn't have an emoji keyboard so that doesn't work. Sorry).
The point is, it may not be a word, but we have loaded those little yellow faces with meaning, a meaning which is often far more complex to express in words. Essentially, we are using body language in texting. This is really cool to me, because this is clearly a new innovation in technology. Never before have phones allowed us to show people our facial expressions, except through photos and videos (and things like Snapchat and FaceTime are still pretty new). But this is an image drawn out in a simple cartoon way that can still express as much as a photo of you could.
But wait, if we're using pictures to communicate, is that really a new form of communication? Look back at the world, and the clear answer is no. Long before written language came to be, cavemen were drawing pictures to tell stories to one another. Even the earliest forms of writing in Mesopotamia and Egypt were largely made of pictures which represented a whole word, rather than just representing a letter the way English written symbols do. So perhaps our smartphones are actually more primitive forms of communication in some ways. By using an abstract image, we can apply meaning to these symbols in a whole other way than we could in English, but at the same time we may just be reverting to a more basic language.
However, this has great potential for future communications, and I am interested to see how this develops in the future. Just think about it, if we could assign meanings to all emojis in a way that let us converse without any words, texting could become a universal language!
I just came across an article that said that the word of the year for 2015 is the crying face smiley emoji. If you're like me, you're thinking: but that's not a word, that's a picture! And you would be right. But think about your texting habits. For some people this may not be true, but how often do you use emojis to add meaning to what you are saying, or send only an emoji as a reply to a message? I know that I do it to let people know that I'm joking, or to show that what I was just talking about is really annoying and how I'm sooo not impressed. (I was going to add emojis to show you what I mean, but then I realized that my computer doesn't have an emoji keyboard so that doesn't work. Sorry).
The point is, it may not be a word, but we have loaded those little yellow faces with meaning, a meaning which is often far more complex to express in words. Essentially, we are using body language in texting. This is really cool to me, because this is clearly a new innovation in technology. Never before have phones allowed us to show people our facial expressions, except through photos and videos (and things like Snapchat and FaceTime are still pretty new). But this is an image drawn out in a simple cartoon way that can still express as much as a photo of you could.
But wait, if we're using pictures to communicate, is that really a new form of communication? Look back at the world, and the clear answer is no. Long before written language came to be, cavemen were drawing pictures to tell stories to one another. Even the earliest forms of writing in Mesopotamia and Egypt were largely made of pictures which represented a whole word, rather than just representing a letter the way English written symbols do. So perhaps our smartphones are actually more primitive forms of communication in some ways. By using an abstract image, we can apply meaning to these symbols in a whole other way than we could in English, but at the same time we may just be reverting to a more basic language.
However, this has great potential for future communications, and I am interested to see how this develops in the future. Just think about it, if we could assign meanings to all emojis in a way that let us converse without any words, texting could become a universal language!
Comments
Post a Comment