Language of the Times
Texting has become the most used way of communicating in our technology-laden culture. No one really wants to send a letter to anyone. Imagine waiting a week to get a response. Three days to send a letter and then three days to get the return response from the sender (if they even wanted to take the time to answer). Of course, you could use a phone and call people up and talk to them directly, but that is so old fashioned when you can simply send a text to their phone and get an instant reply, assuming they bother to look at the message and remember to reply.
With the enhancements to texting technology of emoji’s and memojis, you can now add editorial comments to your texts so that people can understand the nuances of the words you are typing.
So “Have a great day”, you can add a thumbs-up emoji . You don’t even have to say that your sad to hear of your friend’s stress, just send the sad crying face emoji. If you really want to scream out and yell, just send the emoji face with all of the symbols where the mouth should be , denoting cursing or you use the infamous poop emoji , which thankfully someone clued me into as not a chocolate pudding emoji before I used it too often in the wrong place.
You show music, activities, flags of different nations, and more. And once you add memojis, as an Apple user can, you can simulate your own face showing all of these things. And animojis will actually look like they are saying whatever you are recording using your voice.
But emoji’s and the like, with all their choices, seem to be missing some of the more useful ones, that I’m sure if created would be much more popular.
Where’s the raspberry one (or Bronx cheer as I’ve been told), where you stick your tongue out and make that tbtbtbt sound. And how about one for “I’d really like to chat now, but I also really have to go to the bathroom”, which could also be used for “that was so funny I just peed in my pants” emoji. And more sports ones. Hockey only has a hockey stick and a puck. Why not an emoji of someone in a penalty box missing most of his teeth. Or swimming ones, where 4 swimmers are going in one direction and one is going in another and his trunks fell off. Tennis would also have to have a player either jumping over the net, breaking his racket in two, or arguing with the umpire. I’m sure there are a lot more emoji’s out there to invent.
Think of how much more efficient these texts could be if you had enough emojis so that you didn’t even have to use words.
Then again, maybe that’s what the ancient Egyptians and Cavemen had evolved into rather than from before they decided to change to an alphabet and speech method of communicating. We just haven’t found the archeological relics to prove it. If that is the case, then it would seem that once we make that realization that we’ve gone too far and lost too much that our future is destined to return to letters and the spoken word as we once again realize that pictures don’t tell the whole tale.
Only time will tell.