“Not only do I refuse to speak with symbols — emojis, bitmojis, likes, reactions, whatever — I also judge people who do. Is this fair? With AI image generators like the Dall-E Mini becoming mainstream, visual communication will become even easier. I’m afraid we’re missing out on something essential, like actually having something to say.”
— AdWordsmith
Dear Wordsmith,
Your question assumes that there is a clear line between written and visual language, which I regret to point out that is not true. Many writing systems, including cuneiform and Mandarin, are derived from ideograms. Although it can be difficult to express complex ideas in emoticon (excluding the success of some enterprising artists who translated Moby-Dick and the Bible into vernacular), there was nothing stopping these Unicode symbols from evolving into a full-blown language. I might also point out that, as many linguists have said, that modern languages like French were considered “artificial” in their earliest days, or that all things hand about textspeak, the reactions and GIFs echo previous worries that some new development — the printing itself, the writing itself — will cause humanity to regress into a swarm of screaming humans. Even Nabokov, whose Titanic vocabulary contains words like pavonine (like a peacock), callipygian (has a nice butt), and logodaedaly (arbitrary or erratic way of saying words), it was once argued that English would benefit from a letter symbol for smile.
Even if GIFs and emojis are misplaced objects of contempt, I don’t think you’re entirely wrong to fear that our relationship with language is changing. Dall-E Mini, swallowing words and spitting out images, is itself a metaphor for how the visual medium is replacing text as the dominant form of expression in our culture. Of course, this shift started long before the internet, but visuals have clearly thrived in the digital space. The picture’s ability to convey “a thousand words” is a discernible advantage at a time when an article beyond that length tends to get a TL; DR. Compared to the linear level of language, what does the image have? Marshall McLuhan (another genius of neologisms) is called “allatonceness,” the quality of communicating many complex ideas and emotions at once. Like many other forms of electronic media, images are multi-sensory and can convey different concepts in a single frame — a quality that is said to have peaked in hypercombinations. Dall-E’s real.
If more people prefer visual communication, it’s not because these people lack “something to say,” as you put it. Quite the contrary, that’s because images are a more immediate and effective means of representing the human experience in full expression, especially during the rapid boom of the digital era. . McLuhan writes: “At the high speed of electronic communication, old literacy and numeracy skills” are no longer possible; they are too slow to be relevant or effective. “McLuhan’s insight that has survived more than half a century in the dusty milieu of a book reveals that there are important exceptions to this rule. And despite the widespread belief that language and imagery are facing a battle in the Manichaean, I don’t believe it’s the words that matter. People are as eager as ever for the verbal output as it is presented in the human voice, as evidenced by the explosion of podcasts over the past decade Generation Z (a phenomenon documented in many articles intended only for middle-aged people to read) similarly suggests that simple old words, when placed in the warmth of vocal sounds, are more appealing than the GIF image spectrum. and emoticons.
Perhaps the question is not why images are more compelling than language, but why writing and reading — be it lengthy articles, text messages, or Twitter threads — are so terrifying. so. Everyone knows that the habit of reading online has evolved into a tagline of skimming, scanning, and browsing through the source, a problem that has created such a huge pool of op-e and thought that people just It takes a glance to confirm this fact. The specter of illiteracy has led many to conclude that writing is beginning to become obsolete and that until it expires, it is best used in its most minimal, functional form: message generic acronyms for more idiosyncratic expressions, or Gmail’s autoresponder implementation instead of replying with your own voice. Publishers have managed to weather the devastation of the attention economy by shortening articles and streamlining language, making “content” as effective and easy to understand as possible — logic can Perhaps a discarded meal would be easier to digest if it were pureed into a liquid and passed through a straw. In fact, Wordsmith, for all your worries that image generators like Dall-E will replace writing, logophile lovers must fear more from language algorithms like LaMDA and GPT-3which is poised to produce much of this content in the future and erase the last traces of human eccentricity still — sometimes, miraculously — finds its way into published prose.
Technology blogger Ben Dickson has argued that GPT-3’s ability to fool readers into believing its output is man-made is not proof of its sophistication, but proof of the wonders of the world. our poor hope. “Since we relied on algorithms to curate our content, our text was optimized for those algorithms,” he writes. If images increasingly feel like promising alternatives to writing, perhaps that’s a sign that we’ve strayed far from the electrical power of writing and the vitality of voice. Many people believe, like you, Wordsmith, that abstinence from images is a kind of ascetic virtue that will save writing from extinction. In fact, writing’s only hope of redemption lies in the hands of writers willing to tap into its full potential and rediscover the emotional and embodied dimensions we seek in all its forms. expression.
McLuhan once wrote that “prose clearly shows the absence of thought,” an insight that seems to prophesy the mindless clarity of algorithmic output and the transactional form of answers. automatic words. Some 40 years after his death, McLuhan’s prose still captivates readers with its zigzag logic, restless gaps between high and low registers, and flashes of wisdom, all of which force we participate, with all our senses, in the creation of Meaning. It is no coincidence that the person who coined the phrase “the medium is the message” understands that language, one of our oldest technologies, is not merely a container for ideas, but also an important part in the author’s communication. When a writer tries to capture that immediacy, and when the reader encounters — or is impressed — language is infused into the totality of one’s consciousness, the effect is just as urgent as the compelling visual medium. current leader and created static emoji smiles that appear, by comparison, like a lot of cheap punctuation.
To be honest,
Cloud
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