emojification

When I took, and passed, a linguistics course 127 years ago, the prof said, "The simpler a language is, the more complex and sophisticated it is." But he couldn't have said that. It's patently absurd. He likely said the opposite.

Never mind.

Linguists debate whether languages are equally complex or sophisticated. They quibble over whether as a general rule languages become more complex over time. Do they?

Consider emojis.

Emojis don't constitute a language, not exactly. They evolved from emoticons. Both alternative "languages" grew out of keyboard demands and changing habits as our planet, especially Japan, became more digitized.

I'm driving out of my lane here, yet I wonder about the apparent simplicity of sign languages, pictograms, and ideograms. (Don't ask me about the linguistic differences between each. My ignorance means I am not free of cultural biases and preconceptions. Duly noted.) But what if we were to communicate solely by emojis? Are we moving in that direction? And does it signify progress or decline?

Before going further, allow me to note that I will resist resorting to emojis in this post. It's too facile, cheap; somehow cheating. Better to have us picture an infinity of emoji images in our minds.

Part of me feels that a stripped down, minimalist method of communicating by emojis would declutter the conversation, like filtering out static on a distant AM station. That may be so, but we already know the perils of methods such as texting, where tone and intent are easily misconstrued. 

Can emojis be misconstrued?

I once had neighbors who communicated by sign language. When an argument ensued, I could almost hear them shouting. Almost.

What would an argument by emojis look like? For all I know, this happens every day.

How about a stately speech? Could these stark iconic symbols be "stretched" into formal, lofty language, the polished-marble discourse of courtrooms and capitols? 

This invites the topic of translation. I would opt for the opportunity to wax eloquent, soaring above the pedestrian emojis of commonplace chatter.

Something tells me these musings are far from original, already obsolete and outdated. Something tells me that government, corporate, and private hackers and programmers have secretly crafted a post-apocalyptic ready-to-go language, bereft of words and sounds, portable and universal, handmade for a denuded, simmering planet.

deus or dea ex machina

In case you didn't take four years of Latin in high school, the title of this blog post translates to "god or goddess out of the machine." Without googling it, if memory serves right the expression refers to a playwright's trick: to solve a plot dilemma the author injects a solution out of left field, as if a god or goddess had dropped out of the sky to make things right. Something like that. Close enough for my purposes. (I refuse to look it up while writing this. Go ahead. You're sure to look it up now, after this tease.) In this instance, the god or goddess in the machine is the notion of digital commands. I recently signed up with a food-delivery service. I installed an app on my phone and went through the required steps to be a valid delivery person seeking to make a few extra bucks at times of my own choosing. If I put myself on the clock, it makes me available for orders. I digitally inform the molecules or bits or bytes or electronic pulses -- I honestly don't know what -- residing in the app that I'm ready. The app knows where I am by GPS. If I receive a notification of a delivery order, I have 60 seconds to accept or decline the chance to go to the food merchant to pick up the food and then deliver it within a specified time to the person ordering the food and its delivery. A clock image in the upper-right corner of my phone screen starts ticking away the countdown. If I don't accept, someone else gets it. No pressure? Some pressure. Concurrent with this, I receive matching texts from the app. Messages like: "New Order: Go to XYZ (East Moses)." If I get to the food merchant and tarry in the parking lot, I start getting pestered by texts. Where are you? Choices are given, such as "waiting in line," "getting the food," "problem encountered," or "go fuck yourself." Yeah, yeah, I threw that in last one in there. Or if you accept the order and start driving, you might get a text saying something like, "You don't appear to be heading towards the order. Do you need help?" This annoys me because I know damn well where I'm going, thank you. If you fail to respond to an order -- typically because the app is frozen or acting up -- you are scolded. "You missed a delivery opportunity, which will now be offered to the next available PrancingReindeer." 

This digital hectoring wears me down. Who needs the cajoling, scolding, insinuating, needling, pressuring, belittling, and merciless nagging? Not to get too psychoanalytical about all this, but it dredges up the worst memories of growing up. It's a parental-memory nightmare-flashback. For the first time, today I encountered a fellow PrancingReindeer (my name for the delivery squad). He corroborated the woes I had encountered with the app. He was irate, ready to give up on this particular delivery vendor. 

But this person confirmed something I had been considering for a blog topic.

We treat the app like a person or persons.

He kept on using the personal pronoun "they" as he described his frustrations with the app. They said this, they did that, they told me this, they warned me about this, they didn't understand this.

I was thinking the same way.

Then a light bulb went off in my head.

"They" can't go fuck themselves because there is no "they."

I am learning to be calm when I am digitally hectored by the app by reminding myself there is no one behind the curtain, no Wizard of Oz. It is simply an algorithm or whatchamacallit responding to bits of data received or gleaned from me across the ether. It is very easy to think someone is twiddling their thumbs, timing us, watching us, waiting by the door ready to remonstrate us.

Surely the app has oceans of data on my timeliness, responsiveness, accuracy, speed, distance, heart rate, urinary frequency, attire, political views, browsing history, et cetera ad infinitum. And lakes of data are collected on the merchants and food merchants too. No doubt "they" know everything, and are using it to refine the app, I suppose.

But there is no person monitoring my delivery successes or failures. Is there?

It's all just automatically triggered prompts programmed in. 

Right? 

Are you sure?

Hard 2 Get

Does abstinence make the heart grow fonder? How about calmer?

As our “devices” own us ever more, we hear talk of digital fasting and abstinence. (It’s curious how in America the primary meaning of “device” is an electrical invention connected to the internet, a meaning that supersedes older denotations such as scheme, trick, plan, rhetorical tool, or signifying mark. It is also instructive that the roots of the word go back to both “discourse” and “division.”)

Don’t be alarmed. This is not a sermon preaching a Luddite message of unplugging, however worthy that be.

This is something else.

Does the less you connect make you that much more coveted? The novelist Thomas Pynchon is legendary for his elusiveness, his absence. Photographs of the author are rare. J.D. Salinger, author of The Catcher in the Rye, was famously anonymous, to use an oxymoron, even though he was living in plain sight in Cornish, New Hampshire. Their unreachability presumably made reaching out to them all the more alluring. When we see a sign that warns us to avoid “WET PAINT,” we want to touch it.

I have a friend, who happens to be a writer, who has never had and does not now have a cellphone. That makes him singular in my universe. (Actually, not so: my mom, 101 years old, had a cellphone she never used and does not have one now.)

Does this lack of a device make such people “special”? I have my doubts. From my vantage, such folks surrender such status by relying on other cellphone users to breach the digital divide.

My personal history in this vein is inconclusive. I resisted owning a smartphone because I thought the device would own me. I surrendered in 2015. Although upgrading my phone had little to do with feeling either more or less connected, I couldn’t be special anymore by smugly declaring, “Oh. I don’t own a cell. You kidding? Not me.”

I would suggest that the business world and the personal world abide by different social norms regarding digital abstinence, fasting, and promptness — a category similar to fasting, though paucity and duration are different aspects.

As for my own personal world, my data set is a small sample: one person with a limited circle of family, ex-wives and girlfriends, friends, and acquaintances.

I aim for a daily text to my children. Some days I miss. If any of us were to go silent for more than a day, two the most, we would find a need to check in more actively.

What about intimate friends (there’s a euphemism if there ever was one)? What are the 21st century protocols — if any — for response rapidity and frequency? What is the fine line between playing hard to get and crossing over into the phenomenon of ghosting? Is the notion of “hard to get” an ancient artifact of another century?

If I am interested in someone, my obsessive personality makes it nearly impossible to refrain from checking my phone (ahem, device) for any morsel of communication at any hour of day or night or under any circumstance, time, or place.

Is this constant temperature gauging an infinite neurosis, or merely the commonplace anxiety of the modern age?

Send me a text. Now. Don’t leave me waiting.

digitalitis

Returning from the bathroom at 3:08 a.m., you check the iPad by your bed, more out of daytime habit than need or expectation. No emails, no notifications. Same with your pre-smartphone "device." No messages or calls silently announced (because you purposely dictate silence in the night hours, though that carries a risk of not learning of a dire need or catastrophe, personal or global). Arousing from a slumber, late, just before 8:30, you check again while lounging in bed, warmly enveloped under layers of flannel sheet, comforter, and thin quilt. Again, nothing. No white numeral embedded in the red alert circle in the upper right of the tablet's mail app; no announcement bars of missed calls or messages on the outdated unsmartphone that people mistakenly think is a Blackberry. You have your standard breakfast: Heidelberg Cracked Wheat toasted; three slices, all with Earth Balance Original spread, one with Welch's grape jelly; Simply Balanced organic black tea; a dash of whole milk; grapes. As is your custom, while you eat you partake of a digital fast, ignoring blips or pops or other notifications, which you make aurally available now that you are mobile and inching toward awakeness. After breakfast, you check again. Nothing. No emails, alerts, notifications. You attribute this to a legion of logical explanations (others' busyness, server issues, expirations, wifi seizures, unpaid subscriber services, spam, memory lapse, lack of directness or clarity toward the outside world), but after only the third day of this white space, this barren digital plain -- three infinitely long days, mind you! -- you begin to wonder who you were, or are, as you take a tissue and wipe the Richard-Nixon-like sweat that has begun to bead on your upper lip.