Have you noticed that the widespread availability of emojis/emoticons/electroheiroglyphics has particularly influenced how younger folks communicate? Joanna Gray has, and has her concerns about the whole thing:
One of the markers future historians will use when describing the New Dark Ages will be the collapse in the use of the alphabet in favour of “Yookay Hieroglyphics”. A demoralising development has emerged: a whole new form of pictographic language whereby children and young adults engage in hours-long online conversations with each other without the need for any letters, texts or words. Such conversations largely occur on gaming platforms, Snapchat and WhatsApp, and mark a classic regressive step in civilisational decline.
Like the medieval laity who relied on church wall paintings and stained glass to learn stories, a growing proportion of our current population is now using only pictographic communication. This time, there is no divine knowledge behind the imagery – just inane slop. I shall try to use words to describe this new pictographic language that groups of teenagers I work with have shared with me. When first shown, I felt like Howard Carter entering Tutankhamun’s tomb and waving a torch at the walls of hieroglyphics in wonderment. Yookay Hieroglyphics are read vertically from top to bottom. If drawn on Snapchat, they often instantly disappear on reading or after 31 days, making linguistic analysis particularly fraught.
A useful starting point when attempting to read Yookay Hieroglyphics is to think of the wonderfully coloured whizzy strip of cherries, bananas, apples, horseshoes, numbers, etc. on a slot machine. Reams and reams of such images are being sent from one person to another within microseconds. It often begins with one pictographic innovator (teenager) photographing their face and sending their image; their friend replies with their face; what then follows is a rapid exchange of images from one to another, creating a roll of vertically read hieroglyphics: distorted face, laughing emoji, pic of pet, pet pic distorted, laughing face, feeling sick emoji, question mark, toilet gif, sick emoji, prayer emoji, pic of dragon, happy face, pic of person smiling, distorted pic, AI-ed moving image of that pic, cat video, pic of nails, nail art inspo, gif witch nails, cross face, face with witch filter on, lol emoji, pic of face with wizard filter, pic of wizard distorted, instantly made sticker of that image, lol emoji, red laser coming out of wizard eyes filter, OMG emoji … and on and on and on and on and on.
Because I am not of the emerging linguist tribe, I will be unable to fully convey the nuances and depth of the meaning in this sample conversation – indeed a paper has concluded that emoji-based language is more layered in adolescents than in adults.
