Are We Becoming a Post-Verbal Society?
Are We Becoming a Post-Verbal Society?
On his late-night talk show last week, Jimmy Kimmel has been airing comedy bits featuring text messages and other on-line postings completely composed of “emojis,” those little cartoon figures evolved from “icons,” itself a misnomer. Instead of readable words, the result resembles a cross between the rebus puzzles given to children in pre-reading classes and Egyptian hieroglyphics.
The modern use of pictographs is nothing new. In Truffaut’s 1966 filmed version of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, books are burned and reading is a punishable offense, as we see commuters on the futuristic subway train looking at newspapers containing only the comics section.
With the dawn of the computer age, the expectation was for an open exchange of ideas, a true democracy in the realm of free speech. But somewhere along the way “content” began to be buried in the technology, while opinions and “sound bites” received more attention than measured expression. Sentences and words shrunk down to bare minimums, with the prime example a 140-character limit on the wildly popular “Twittersphere.”
Now emojis threaten to make words themselves obsolete.
A couple of the websites I visited seem to promote emojis as a good thing! The notion is that emojis, as the name suggests, are emotionally more palatable than an actual written sentence. Yet what happens to nuance, subtlety, cognitive meaning? Where is it written (pun intended) that emotion should take precedence over thought?
Has our society become so simple-minded and superficial that words have become something to avoid?
Please join with me by praying to the God of your choice that beautiful, evocative,challenging words aren’t becoming obsolete!
Your thoughts? (While we still have words to express them.)
http://promotionholdings.com/corpora.../fluent-emoji/
http://bizshifts-trends.com/2014/09/...y-hieroglyphs/
