One artist addressed this issue at the Second Lives exhibit at the Museum of Art and Design in Manhattan, which runs through April 19, 2009. In a commentary on what language means today, the artist uses icons to depict a conversation between two people who meet on board an airplane, an icon-rich environment.
After reading the story in icons, which features a running narrative below it, museum goers are invited to engage in their own dialog using only symbols. A computer features a dictionary-style listing of icons from which to select and construct sentences.
Does it work? Well, you could form a limited range of sentences using the icons, but I wasn’t able to decipher the icon sentences that other museum goers had left. I believe that two reasons account for this.
The first is that icons derive their meaning, in large part, only after repeated exposures. That’s why in many cases, icons are still accompanied by text below them. Another factor influencing the readability of icons is context — the environment in which the symbols appear provides clues to what they mean.
In all, this is an interesting commentary on how the nature of language is changing in a time when IM texting has given rise to widely understood abbreviations, emoticons are commonly used to convey base emotions, and corporate logos have become a shorthand for a range of values and stories.
WAKE UP CALL: So what ramifications does this have for us as a culture? On the upside, symbols provide a shorthand for allowing people to communicate with each other quicker and easier than ever before. On the other hand, in a world that increasingly communicates through visual rather than written methods, we need to be aware of the ways in which nuanced and complex thought is being compromised.
Whenever we talk about icons or pictographs as a substitute for language, the topic of Chinese or Japanese comes to mind. At least for me it does. Certainly, any linguist specializing in these languages could go on for hours about the subtle differences between pictographs and ideograms and how Chinese characters aren’t quite icons, etc etc.
But for the sake of simplicity, let’s just say that Chinese and Japanese are far more closely related, in their written forms, to this kind of icon/symbol language that the museum exhibit is playing with. As you point out, icons derive their meanings from repeated exposures. At first glance, it might seem to the average American (or other Westerner) that, for example, 🙂 or ☺ is a smile, but for Chinese or Japanese speakers, it’s only natural that 笑 is “to smile” or “to laugh”. Once it’s widely accepted, and widely known and agreed upon, that a given symbol has a given meaning, it’s little different from language, right?
As emoticons and the like have begun to inflitrate our online language – and the emoticons are far more plentiful and creative in Japan than in the West, I’d argue – we do have to rethink what constitutes a “character” or a valid word. Is “lol” a word? The Japanese just use “笑”, or “w” (the “w” is an abbreviation of “warae”, which is how 笑 is pronounced).
I also think about symbols a lot as many have become nearly ubiquitous and universal across the world. Even when you can’t read the signs, you can usually find the bathrooms, the stairs, the elevators, the public phones, no matter where you are in the world (well, maybe I should qualify that by saying something about these symbols only being available in modern buildings, not absolutely anywhere and everywhere, but you get my point).
A fascinating topic. Thank you for this post.