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The Emoji Code by Professor Vyvyan Evans

20 Thursday Jul 2017

Posted by David Smallwood in Thumbing Through Thursday

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Professor Vyvyan Evans, The Emoji Code, Thumbing Through Thursday

“meanwhile the people are dead in their droves
but nobody noticed

well actually

some of them noticed.
You could tell by the emoji they posted.”

– Kate Tempest, From ‘Europe is Lost’ in Let Them East Chaos

Sometimes when I go to my local supermarket on my lunchbreak, I pass a shop selling emoji-shaped backpacks. It is a marker of how ubiquitous they have become that they have escaped the confines of the digital realm and can now be sold, bought and worn as an accessory IRL (‘In Real Life’, for those not savvy to internet abbreviations.).

In The Emoji Code, Professor Vyvyan Evans explores this pictographic phenomenon and posits that Emoji, (capitalised when referring to the system as a whole and not when referring to individual symbols,) rather than substituting for a language, is primarily used in the same way non-verbal gestures, expressions and paralinguistic signals (grunting, coughing, intonation etc.) are used in face-to-face communication. Perhaps a further distinction between physical cues in face-to-face and vocal cues in telephone conversations would have been nice, but since it is not central to the argument, the omission is not a problem.

Evans is very good on historical context and how language is always in flux but I would have liked to have read a comparison to the change between face-to-face conversation and the invention of the telephone, which seems to me the most pertinent previous linguistic transition, as the removal of any facial expression or gesticulation from communication to only words and paralinguistic signals.

He uses plenty of examples and research, with perhaps a little too much reliance on the former, but I doubt there is a wide variety of statistical data available and the anecdotal evidence is, however, illuminating. It is useful to know that some emoji have different meanings in different languages, like that the hands ‘praying’ in the UK would mean ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ in Japan.

Another invaluable insight I discovered from the book, among many others, is that anyone can nominate an emoji, that ‘An individual Chinese-American businesswoman has as much influence as […] an American corporate food-giant.’ Professor Evans states that persons living or dead are not eligible for consideration as emoji, but I know that the footballers Neymar Jr and Paul Pogba were promoted as having them, although they may just be downloadable ‘stickers’ without a Unicode character, so I would venture they are not true emoji. If that is the case, they should not be presented as such in the media. Whether the system will continue to be as democratic as Professor Evans declares it is anyone’s guess.

Because of the resistance to change from those who the author refers to as ‘language mavens’, the book often reads like a defence of Emoji use, focusing on the benefits and none of the downsides. I’m not saying he’s in the pockets of a hypothetical ‘Big Emoji’, but Professor Evans appears to be firmly entrenched on the pro-emoji side.

He points out that Emoji is usually used at the beginning or end of a sentence and is therefore used as a form of multimodality. He mentions people who are actually substituting language with Emoji, such as the artist who rewrote Alice in Wonderland using only the symbols and a journalist who wrote an article the same way, but these are exceptions to common usage. He rarely includes examples where people use single or few emoji, as referred to in the quotation above, where a single emoji is hardly an adequate display of feeling. They may be comparatively rare, but because of the huge amount of usage, might constitute a significant number.

One particular bugbear of mine is the use of the smiley face emoji with tears coming out of the eyes. Like the preceding internet abbreviation for ‘laugh out loud’, lol, which was often used when the person had not actually laughed out loud, how many people are actually crying with laughter when they use this emoji? Is this hyperbole an advantage in communication because it cannot be misconstrued and accurately represents their interior emotion, or is it a disadvantage because it inaccurately depicts the state of the sender? At the present time on emojitracker.com, this particular emoji is the only one to have been used over a billion times. If that many people were actually crying with laughter, we could probably solve any impending water crisis with desalination equipment and the tears of our joy.

What it doesn’t examine is the cause for the lightning-quick proliferation of emoji.  My (admittedly speculative) guess would be that although it is not as expressive as video or face-to-face communication, it is more expressive than text, and although they were more convenient than video, previous emoticons and pictograms were not as convenient as text. I would venture that, when the latter obstacle is removed, and each emoji, with some combinatory exceptions, inhabits a single Unicode character and is displayed as an option for predictive text, it is no surprise that Emoji, with its happy synthesis of expressiveness and convenience, has enjoyed such popularity.

In David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, which has aspects of speculative fiction, he explains that videophones never took off because people were too vain to get made up for video calls and would often be distracted during the conversation, which led to them being less popular than the telephone, where the illusion of attention can be maintained. I wonder if something similar is not also happening with emoji. After all, they don’t need to get ready and they never seem distracted.

It is possible you may even be limiting your digital emotional vocabulary by not using emoticons. In the epigram at the beginning of Tony Harrison’s ‘v.’, there is a quotation form Arthur Scargill: ‘My father still reads the dictionary every day. He says your life depends on your power to master words.’ Whether there will be a circumstance in which your life depends on your power to master emoji is up for debate, but that they are useful is hard to question.

On the whole, The Emoji Code is an excellent primer on a young subject and I can wholly recommend it. I expect there will be a more detailed analysis soon, but for now this serves as a great introduction. I have definitely moved from regarding them as occasionally useful symbols to invaluable as a means of modern digital communication and will probably start using them more, which, if not the book’s aim, is at least the effect.

But I’m still not buying a backpack.

The Cyber Effect by Dr. Mary Aiken

16 Friday Sep 2016

Posted by David Smallwood in Thumbing Through Thursday

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Dr Mary Aiken, The Cyber Effect, Thumbing Through Thursday

*I have received a copy of this book as part of a goodreads giveaway*

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”

– Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

The Cyber Effect is a welcome but broad overview of the consequences the rapid expansion of the internet and its accessibility has had for modern psychology, and by extension society.

Although Dr. Mary Aiken often repeats her mantra that the technology itself is neither good nor bad, barring sections of the Cyber-Romance chapter, occasional proposed solutions and the call to arms in the concluding remarks, the majority of the book focuses on the negative effects. The bias is perhaps understandable as Aiken has advised several investigative bodies on cybercrime, has clearly seen some horrific things and is very good on potential remedies. The sections are illuminating, well-written and easy to comprehend, but I wished it had been balanced a little more by the positive attributes like community, charity and crowdfunding. Though I suppose these have been espoused enough elsewhere, the book does create the impression that we are living in the worst of times when, as Dickens says above, it always appears to be both the best and worst of times and a period of great change.

As a consequence of this, Aiken seems certain that the invention of the internet has changed everything and is an unprecedented social experiment. This is evidenced by the Aiken’s tendency to adapt words to include prefixes like ‘cyber’ or ‘techno’. Obviously her subject is ‘cyber’, but personally I think this is overplayed as I do not think there is much new under the sun. It is the prevalence of the medium that has exacerbated certain psychological traits that have always existed. What is unprecedented is the scale rather than the psychology, which, as many of Aiken’s historical examples show, is very much precedented.

Having recently read Lucy Worsley’s ‘A Very British Murder’, I was struck by the similarities between the introduction of the internet and the urbanisation and mass migration to cities during the industrial revolution.

There were several references in the chapter “Frankenstein and the Little Girl” that reinforced this idea to me. Aiken refers to how industrialisation affected child labour and how laws were eventually implemented to protect them as they need to be with the internet. She quotes John Suler as saying “You wouldn’t take your children and leave them alone in the middle of New York City, and that’s effectively what you’re doing when you allow them to go into cyberspace alone.” But New York City has the NYPD to protect its citizens, while early 19th Century London didn’t even have a Metropolitan police. The escalation in crime eventually led to its formation. Obviously I am not advocating that it is okay to leave a child alone in NYC because of the NYPD but rather that the internet, like the growing urban cities of the past, is generating a level of crime that is going to require the creation of a special group tasked to protect people online. The Metropolitan Police have recently set up such a unit, but it is hardly enough to tackle the scale of the problems. She refers to the Bystander Effect, or Diffusion of Responsibility, which is the idea that the more people who witness a crime or emergency, the less likely anyone is to help or respond. Have you ever seen someone in distress in a public place and walked on by? Policing the internet faces the same issue.

Perhaps nothing solidified this correlation to urbanisation for me as much as the story of the two girls who committed murder in the name of Slender Man. You would think such a story would be incredibly modern. One murder some propose as the first of Jack the Ripper’s took place 2 days after the stage play of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde took place in London, some theorising that he drew inspiration from this. Aiken notes the influence of the film Child’s Play on the murder of Jamie Bolger. You could bring up other examples: the Aurora shooting at a screening of The Dark Knight Rises or the man who was inspired to buy ricin from the Dark Web after watching Breaking Bad. As Oscar Wilde once said, “Life imitates Art more than Art imitates life.”

A recent study has even suggested the media reporting on mass shootings actually increases the amount of mass shootings in the following days through the contagion effect. Behavioural contagion often studies crowds, which became more prevalent during periods of urbanisation. I am reminded of Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Man of the Crowd”, in which a man seems to be constantly part of the crowd. Maybe if Poe were alive today he would have written a story called “The Man of the Internet” about a man who seems to be constantly on the internet. The original story even has an epigraph from 2 centuries earlier, from “The Characters of Man” by Jean de La Bruyère: “This great misfortune, of not being able to be alone.” Perhaps Wordsworth might have begun a poem about the city “I wandered lonely in a crowd.” Sherry Turkle’s TED Talk on being “Connected, but Alone” has the same resonance.

The psychology of the internet is very similar to the concerns people voiced about urbanisation: the proliferation of anonymity where people previously had known the whole community, the disinhibition provoked by this and the accessibility of a wide variety of experiences, not always morally virtuous. Maybe it was because psychology was not yet a discipline when mass urbanisation was happening we do not have the concepts that could be derived from that, but it wouldn’t surprise me that had psychology been an accepted discipline before mass urbanisation that Aiken would have amended the words to begin with ‘urban’ or ‘metropolitan’.

I think some of the psychological effects go back even further. Here’s a quotation put into the mouth of Socrates by Plato in his Phaedrus:

“Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.”

Doesn’t that description sound like somebody describing the malignant misinformation of the Internet nowadays?

As Jorge Luis Borges wrote in “Borges and I”, the written self and the actual self are always different. Such is it with the cyber self and the actual self. The section on “Cyberchondria” notes how the internet can exacerbate health concerns, but there is a precedent for this as well. At the beginning of Jerome K Jerome’s “Three Men in a Boat”, the narrator goes to the British Museum to find out what his ailment is and diagnoses himself with everything except Housemaid’s Knee. It is a clear case of hyperchondria similar to that described in The Cyber Effect, and Aiken mentions Gray’s Anatomy as previously being potentially used for such a purpose, as well as the fictional example of Hungry Joe in Joseph Heller’s Catch 22.

If we are going to refer to the prevalence of the current problem as ‘cyberchondria’, should we not also retroactively refer to the hypochondria influenced by books as ‘bibliochondria’? If we refer to Munchausen by Internet should we not also refer to Don Quixote as suffering from Munchausen by book? If we refer to the ‘technosomatic effect’, should we not also refer to the bibliomatic effect?

One final minor bugbear: Aiken at one point says “All gathered knowledge of human civilisation is available by using search engines” or will be, but this is hyperbole. There are things in printed books that are not on the internet yet and may never be because of disinterest, people who choose not to record things, or some other factor and all the while information is constantly expanding.

The Cyber Effect tackles such a wide range of issues that I think it is invaluable as a source of information about the psychological repercussions of the internet, but it is far from comprehensive and I wished some subjects had been explored in greater detail. However, as you can see from the above, it was incredibly stimulating and thought-provoking, often with explanations that make you feel like you’ve turned toward the light from Plato’s cave. It has whetted my mental appetite and some subjects I will investigate further, so despite the aforementioned personal gripes, I would recommend it to anyone who wants a little insight into where the world with is wide tangled web that has been woven might be heading.

*This review has also been posted on goodreads*

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