Summary:
It is interesting to me that in 2001, Bolter identified that “the relationship between word and image is becoming increasingly unstable” (p. 49). At the time the evidence lay in various types of published materials that were mixing modes of text and image. Now of course, we might actually identify that the relationship between word and image has become indistinguishable, as the emoticon has become a virtual de facto standard in text messaging norms. In the essence, emoticons are words. And while it’s true that an entire message can be constructed using emoticons, for myself that is not the way I personally use them. For me, an emoticon is an addon that I use to inject flavour, emotion, or, one might say, a certain “je ne sais quoi” into an otherwise simple text message. In their fullest form, it might be easy to imagine emoticons as representing a kind of return to picture writing. The standardized nature of their adoption pushes them towards being universally translatable, but it is hard to imagine that there might not be connotations that differ significantly between cultures for many of the symbols. By removing language from the message, we gain the advantage Bolter noted that it is quite possible for “speakers of different languages [to] share the same system of picture writing.” (p. 59). In fact, the prevalence of emoticons on a worldwide level proves this to still be true.
There are two big limitations in this however. First, as Bolter also notes, “picture writing lacks narrative power” (p. 59). I have read many books recently, but I had difficulty choosing a book to use for this assignment as most of the titles had a more narrative aspect to them. I would add to this that there is only a limited set of non-concrete nouns that can be expressed – another serious limitation in my book selection. Second, there is a natural by-product to Bolter’s assertion that the same pictures may be shared amongst many languages. Since languages often do not have direct translations for certain ideas or concepts, there is an automatic ambiguity added to the message if the receiver speaks a different language. Not the kind of ambiguity we might be concerned with when considering connotations of words for speakers of the same language, but one at a much deeper level, embedded in the nature of the concept itself. In my own message above, my last symbol is one that, I assume, would be standard for many in the western world, but I fully realize might be entirely unrecognizable to many different people in many different cultures. Kress has identified this ambiguity as a characteristic of words. He assumes that there is an inherent vagueness to words that always requires the meaning of the message to be constructed by the receiver (Kress, 2005). While I don’t deny the veracity of this principle, I think it is magnified by the use of pictures, however standardized they may become. This becomes especially interesting when we think of it the other way around. How do we choose a standard image for, let’s say, an athlete? What exactly does an athlete look like? Does every culture have the same image for an athlete? And if we therefore have to make more than one to fulfill everyone’s needs, it seems to me that we have defeated the purpose of the picture in the first place. Ambiguity seems destined to always rule; or at the very least, remains reluctant to give up its pride of place in human communication.
References:
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
Kress (2005), Gains and losses: New forms of texts, knowledge, and learning. Computers and Composition, Vol. 2(1), 5-22