“...[I]t’s hard to imagine a more ‘low brow’, seemingly
inconsequential topic for discussion than the meaning of — and the meaning of
our use of — those ubiquitous digital pictographs known as ‘emojis’.
They seem innocuous, but since their invention more than two decades ago,
emojis have come to permeate our forms of online communication. They are, in
many respects, the perfect expression of what communication has become in a
social-media saturated age:
· they are primarily visual,
rather than textual;
· they can be selected and
sent quickly;
· they are purposefully
brief and, in most instances, consumable at a glance (the exceptions, more
often than not, prove the rule);
· their content is both
emotional and subject to political trends (from the lobbying that takes place
to have new emojis put into circulation, to the old emojis that fall out of
fashion);
· and their use enables
algorithms to better “understand”, and therefore target, the mood of their
users.
“Thought of in these terms,
reflecting on the ubiquity of emojis and the unthinkingness that surrounds
their use becomes a helpful means of thinking about our habits of
communication. Has the fact that our lives are saturated with words made us,
ironically, weary of words, and thus more responsive to glyphs, and gifs, and
pictographs, and images? Are we becoming — or, indeed, have we become —
effectively morally illiterate, which is to say, incapable of being
moved by any but the most emotionally charged, readily consumable forms of
communication? Are we growing increasingly inattentive, and incapable of
lingering with complexity? If so, is this the product of brevity, or of speed?
“But quite apart from
the consumption of emojis, what about their expressive character? Do the really
communicate anything meaningful about their users? Or are they just one more
form of our careful cultivation of online personas, whose true function is to
avoid any real disclosure?”
(ABC Religion & Ethics)
You can read reflections
from our guest, Dr Samuel Shpall, here: some of the implications of our use
of emojis.
Samuel Shpall is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Sydney.
"...Emojis are the most visible icon of cultural textification
ReplyDeleteWe live by the text [sun shining emoji], we die by the text [coffin emoji]. We eat by the text [noodles emoji], we sex by the text [wet emoji]. Am I alone in thinking this disturbing? And hold on — since when must we apologise for employing the telephone for its original purpose? ('Hey, sorry to call you, but …') Since when is speaking to someone an affront to their right to remain silent — in other words, their right to converse only in the sonorous, unilateral staccato of a demonstrably labile thumb-consciousness?
"There used to be a thing called meeting people in public. It involved talking to them, and perhaps surreptitiously smelling them, and sensing their personality from subtle movements and pauses and gestures, and only then deciding whether to try to sleep with them or befriend them or give them a fake number. There used to be a thing called the art of conversation. It was the opposite of multi-texting. If you are tempted to call the latter an art, then you are probably a megalomaniacal millennial. I’m texting my mother and emailing seven students right now while I write this article. It isn’t even hard, so it certainly doesn’t count as art..." -Samuel Shpall
"...Opportunities for knowledge often present themselves in the form of apparent paradoxes. How could more words and symbols make us less literate? Well, haven’t you heard of choice fatigue, or gluttonous overload? Too many options can ruin our choices; too much pleasure can dull the senses.
ReplyDelete"Exercise 2: Ask yourself, iluvmemesxx99: Have I consumed so many bite-sized fragments that I’ve forgotten how to have the kind of private idea that it would take an entire dialogue to express? If you are tempted to insert [mind exploding emoji], we are making progress.
"Our thoughts and feelings are conditioned by their habitual modes of expression. Just as young boys should be encouraged to cry, so too should old men be encouraged to write poetry instead of posting embarrassingly derivative political screeds on Facebook. It is easy to forget that all of life is a moral laboratory — whose most powerful instrument is inertia. Laziness seems cosy until too much automation makes us opaque even to ourselves.
"Proposal: Conceive of literacy not just as a capacity to read difficult texts, but also as a capacity to read the book of the world. (Spoiler alert: The best chapters include difficult situations with actual flesh and blood people.) As François do La Rochefoucauld put it: 'It is more vital to study men than books.' The wise reader is active in her patience; passionate in her even-temper; spontaneous in her consideration; aggressive in her sensitivity; and, above all, dogmatic in her curiosity. How on earth could we find training in these dispositions? There used to be this thing called a library card..." -Samuel Shpall
"...On stuff: There is something good about the impulse to abbreviate, which gave birth to email and texting and Twitter and the no-platforming of hacks. It cuts to the chase and frees up time for other pursuits (just think of a crisp verdict from an insightful friend). Or it clears away noise and focuses us on life’s densest nuggets of beauty (consider a brilliant poem). These virtues of abbreviation are connected. Only poetic and philosophical compression can rival the density of an eloquent gesture from an intimate.
ReplyDelete"On happiness: Unfortunately, our technologies are Frankenstein’s monsters. Consider the banal insanity of email, which “saves us time” by putting us forever on the clock. Consider the epistemic irony of the internet, which houses worlds of knowledge and makes us more closed-minded. Consider the neon darkness of Instagram, which promises human connection while delivering us to self-absorption. Narcissus, it must be said, was lucky: a natural reflection still looks better than any selfie.
"When I see such convoluted twisting of our intentions, I try to reflect on how our emotional entrails sustain it [monocle emoji]. What does content overload do to us? To what inside us does it respond? The fragmentation of attention. The erosion of patience. The outsourcing of serenity. The socialisation of anxiety. The normalisation of addiction. Meditate, if you dare, on the hypothesis that we are all becoming lazy slot-machine hedonists, and that this doesn’t have half the dignity of hedonism done right. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have half the pleasure either.
"Perhaps you think I’m just a dinosaur in sheep’s clothing — a condescending elite, resentful because his ship (which is to say, his books) has sailed? But our collective degeneration is refreshingly democratic; my scorn is correspondingly generous; indeed, its favourite target is myself. To get a PhD, after all, you must spend your nights maniacally refreshing your email inbox and commenting (innocuously, of course — you aren’t a professor yet) on the snarkiest Twitter interventions into the kerfuffle du jour. Once upon a time, education was a training in judgment..." -Samuel Shpall
From John Church:
ReplyDelete“Somehow reminds me of: ‘American higher education has displaced moral truth with a melange of ‘values’ and forsaken reason for the trivial pursuit of ‘relevance’.’ - from Allan Bloom’s 1987 book The Closing of the American mind.
“‘The eternal conflict between good and evil has been replaced with ‘I’m OK, you’re OK’, says Bloom. Men and women once paid for difficult choices with their reputations, their sanity, even their lives. But no more,’ says Bloom. ‘America today has no-fault auto accidents, no-fault divorces, and it is moving with the aid of modern philosophy toward no-fault choices. We unthinkingly embrace a blind tolerance in which we consider it ‘moral’ never to think we are right because that would mean someone else is wrong.’”