As I began reading this chapter, I thought of the saying “a picture of worth a thousand words.” As we shift to a more visual heavy medium (for example, moving from radio whodunit broadcast shows to television, descriptive narratives that paint a picture are replaced with, well, just the painted picture, I can’t help but feel that words as an artform will be changed and inevitably lost. Are comic books, manga, light novels, and visual novels, where images replace descriptive prose, relacing full on novels? Or is it like in our previous readings where the new mediums support the old? I think back to my IB English days two decades ago, where the Journals of Susanna Moody combined poetry with images.
While originally I also thought about the universality of images, I came to disagree with myself. When I first introduce Theory of Knowledge, one introductory task is New York Time’s “What is going on in this picture” task. To support constructivism, students with different cultural backgrounds and experiences are able to gleam different information from the text. If we go back to Boroditsky’s idea that language affects thought, perhaps, more importantly, culture affects the interpretation of information (both words and images), which affects thought.
My point made in the manual printing task seem to echo some of the points made in this chapter. In the mid 00’s when I got my first laptop, I still primarily used paper notes due to the difficulty in drawing diagrams, something that’s essentially for a degree is Chemistry. It was only in the late ’10s when, from memory, touch screens and stylus technology took off that I began to fully replace paper with electronics.
As mentioned previously, I still argue that written Chinese has numerous logograms embedded in their written symbols, due to the uniqueness of written Chinese not having a technical alphabet system. The characters for one, two, and three, are essentially number of sticks somewhat similar to Roman numerals (一,二,三). Field is 田, showing sectioned off rice patties, while the character for mountain, 山, showcases peaks. Door/gate, 門, looks like old saloon doors, and river looks like 川.
At this point I pause, reflect, and prepare myself for this week’s task. I argued that written Chinese lends itself to being logograms partially due to a lack of a written alphabet (it gets a bit more complicated than that if we consider Chinese radicals, various sections that can make up a written Chinese character), then wouldn’t that imply that emojis would have less usage in countries that use Chinese? Indeed, I find that my conversations with family members and friends, “stamps,” rather than emojis, are used instead. Stamps are popular emoji-like images that one can send in, for example, Line, the top instant messaging app in Taiwan. Stamps are similar to stock GIFs within Line that are frequently animated and contain more than just an image, for example, a drawn figure giving a thumbs up and saying “thanks.” Contrastly, emojis are less frequently used in conversation.
That said, perhaps this is an age thing. I consider myself one of the early users of the internet as it was being widespread (~1997), and being bilingual, from memory I can attest to a difference in emoticon (the precursors to emojis) styles. While English emoticons are typically limited to punctuation, leading to faces such as ;), emoticons I’ve seen used in Chinese websites (which are often inspired by Japanese emojis), have different emphasis, such as =) using lines for eyes, or ^_^ to denote smiley faces. There’s also the fact that Chinese/Japanese allows more variety in characters that can lend itself to emojis, such as
(凸ಠ益ಠ)凸 showing an angry person giving the finger to someone. To reiterate my original point about logographs, 囧 itself is a Chinese word turned emoticon, its original meaning replaced by its semblance to a face in distress. Another non-English emoticon, orz, comes to mind, showing a person kneeing on the ground in despair, further illustrating the focus less on just the face, but various other body gestures in Eastern emoticons.