I chose the story as much for simplicity of telling as for ease of visual representation. I knew the range of emoticons would be restricted so I wanted something that would make for an interesting story but would not involve too much nuance. While writing, I quickly found myself resorting to a system used in Chinese, that of roots or radicals. This was a function of a limited number of emoticons to work with and also of the difficulty in expressing complex concepts as images. I have studied Chinese so I don’t know how readily this technique would have occurred to me otherwise but it is a logical and elegant solution. Complex concepts are constructed by combining pictographs of simpler ideas where one pictograph is a classifier, the radical, and the other gives a specific instance. So a particular human face followed by swirling star always indicates a person is a magician while one followed by a mortar board indicates a teacher. The word is built out of two emoticons working together in a set combination. I conveyed the verb “betray” with a pair of emoticons, one the well-known stylized theatre masks and another of a winking face. You can see it in the middle of the last line.  Together these suggest deception or at least the sense that things are not as they seem.

One clear advantage of this style of writing is that it is more entertaining. There is variety in colour and shape and a pleasing contrast with the other emoticons. A dragon emoticon is more stimulating to look at than the word “dragon”. It is also more likely to trigger dragon-related associations in the mind and memory and to fix the idea of a dragon vividly in the imagination. The problem of course is that if the reader is not given decoding instructions, both the system itself and the meanings of each combination would have had to be worked out by puzzling and guessing. A fascinating aspect of this technique is that it can be continuously elaborated using new sets of three or even four emoticons to form extended visual metaphors representing very sophisticated concepts. Eventually, however, a kind of semiotic distancing occurs between the physical objects depicted by each emoticon and the same emoticons as they are used in various combinatory meanings. Each emoticon begins, but never completely ceases, to be a “picture”. Chinese friends have said this lingering bond between pictographs and real things gives Chinese a concreteness lacking in phonetic writing.

Kress (2005) also speaks approvingly of the clarity of depiction over the vagueness of the word, but in his case the wariness towards text may be the bias of a post-structuralist who might be expected to favour an image dominant mode of expression. A core assumption of that view is that words are, at best, deeply ambiguous, not signs but signifiers. We could legitimately ask why, if the image-dominant networked mode is superior, or at the least the wave of the future, would Kress then rely almost exclusively on conventional text to present his key ideas? What images are used serve as illustrations for what he explains in his text. You might claim, as he does himself, that this is because entrenched power structures in the elite are fighting a rearguard battle, that it is all about privilege, dominance and control, and you might conclude, as a member of that academic elite, that he is thus obliged to take up the approved weapon and armour of his caste. (Kress, 2005)

Kress (2005) offers another perhaps more plausible explanation: images cannot compete with text in formulating complex concepts. Even images buttressed by hypertext interconnectivity suffer an unavoidable loss in cognitive clarity and intellectual depth. The profundity of thought that verbally rich, syntactically dense text can convey cannot be adequately expressed in remediated form in a multimodal space. This is a limit set by the limitations of the mode itself. Dense text would be not only the most apt mode for conveying the ideas expressed in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, it would be the only possible mode, in this case the mind of man, or more precisely the mode of discursive thought which finds form in written text. Bolter (2010) says that writing is a potent metaphor for the human mind, which is true, but the relationship is more tangible; writing is thought incarnate.

A recurrent theme of the last weeks has been the way in which modes of writing and reading have been expressed through continuously evolving technological media. Each transformation can be seen as a remediation of earlier forms of communication; each new writing space reconstructs its predecessor retaining some features, discarding others and adding new potential as well as, inevitably, new limits. The medium of the printed book has partnered with the mode of the printed text catalyzing a durable and robust cultural matrix. While instability, loss of authorial authority, and associative linking characterize image-dominant networked text, Bolter (2010) reassures us by saying the technology itself is less important than retaining a “literate frame of mind” . However,  this is the implicit danger, that because traditional writing and reading has structured a certain kind of thinking, even a certain kind of consciousness, a literate frame of mind might be an inadvertent casualty of remediation.

References

1. Kress, Gunther, Gains and Losses: New forms of texts, knowledge, and learning. Computers and Composition, Volume 22, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 5-22 doi.org/10.1016/j.compcom.2004.12.004

2. Bolter, J. D. (2001). Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print (2nd ed.). Mahwah, N.J: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. doi:10.4324/9781410600110