ICONS: THE SEQUEL
In the opening pages of this book, I asked you to look closely at the things around you. Now I want you to take a look at these letters, which we call the alphabet:
a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z
Cast your gaze out the window, toward the sky, above the roofs, the mountains, the passing airplanes, the clouds, the emptiness of the stratosphere, the black hole we’ve finally managed to photograph. More than fifty million light-years away from us. The invention of writing is no more than a dot in the world’s history. The alphabet, which these days is everywhere you look, inescapable, is an even tinier dot in our evolution. A kind of epiphenomenon, an accident along the way, a blip.
Now look at this symbol:
@
The “at” sign.
It appears for the first time in 1345, in a manuscript now held at the Vatican, where it’s used to replace the letter a in amen. It’s come a long way since. In Italian, chiocciola, “snail”; in Hebrew, strudel; in Greek, papaki, “duckling”; in Dutch, apenstaartje, “monkey’s tail” (which I can see, to be fair); in Czech and Slovakian, zavináč, “rolled-up pickled herring”; in Danish, snabel-a, “elephant’s trunk a.” In Bosnian it’s ludo a, meaning “crazy a.” And the options abound in Bulgarian: klyomba, “badly written letter”; maymunsko a, “monkey a”; maimunka, “little monkey”; or banitsa, a rolled-up pastry. Shall I go on?
What does all of this suggest? That our brain is fond of the letters in the alphabet—so simple, so few, so flexible—though only up to a certain point. The point when we’re gripped by the need to anchor ourselves to something familiar, something that’s a part of us. Images.
We need images. Which is why we’ve invented emojis. And why we’ll be stuck with them for the foreseeable future. In our digital age of telecommunication, we depend on emojis for nuance, to convey the gestures and expressions that we use when communicating face-to-face.
Face-to-face is the right way to put it. We have a pressing, almost obsessive need to see other faces. We crave those sensory responses that help us distinguish faces and their expressions. It’s a question of practicality: in a world full of faces, having the perceptive capabilities to distinguish them efficiently is an advantage. Which is why we’re always seeing faces where they aren’t (mountains,* taillights, clouds, oil stains, pieces of toast, Munch’s scream, which seems to pop up everywhere).
Our obsession with finding faces in everything is no mere coincidence. It aids us in understanding what another person will do or say. It helps us interpret, to get inside someone else’s head, to predict their next move. This explains our battalion of face emojis. And then the other “pictographic” emojis, such as the apple, the heart, the bee, the rose, the balloon: they’re a natural extension of this.
We have a deep need for images. A need to see things. Not just spell them out. And more and more we’re turning these pictographic emojis into rebuses (remember our ?), especially in English where the rebus comes more naturally.
Emojis are not and never will be a written language. They do, however, stand as a stark reminder of something that we’ve carried with us all these thousands of years spent using the alphabet—something that, because of evolutionary constraints, we’ve never properly emphasized: our cursed, blessed need of iconicity.
This explains why emojis are all the rage and stenography all but dead.
DEAD LETTER
What about a hundred years from now? Will the magic of writing still be alive?
In 1900 (122 years ago), the American civil engineer John Elfreth Watkins made a number of predictions about what the world would look like in the year 2000. The article was published in a women’s magazine like the kind my grandma would read when I was a little girl, the Ladies’ Home Journal, and it’s an illuminating piece. In it, Watkins predicts our move toward a digital future (without using the term digital, of course, though he might as well have), speaking in particular of long-distance, mobile, and live-broadcast communications (telephones, television, and screens), which we now know to have come true.
In other areas, however, such as the alphabet, he wasn’t quite so prescient: it was Watkins’s belief that we’d have by now abandoned the letters c, x, and q, finding them unnecessary. He’s right about their redundancy, but nonetheless grossly mistaken. It’s not his fault, though—we all know how slowly writing crawls.*
Poor Watkins; long-term predictions are never easy. And now here we are, about to try our hand at the same game. What landmark changes will we see during the next hundred years, if we’re not completely extinct by then (which is highly probable)?
Here we go. We’ll be using the ocean not only for fish-farming but also to cultivate algae, which we’ll employ as a renewable energy source. Artificial intelligence will outstrip us, as expected, given that we already have a name for the phenomenon: the Singularity. Genetics and biotechnology, however, will compensate, bringing about an explosion of new intelligence that will all but grant us immortality: we’ll upload our consciousness to a computer and live forever. We will see, perhaps, the death of death.
Let’s keep going.
The brain-computer interface will be complete. Forget about virtual reality (primitive stuff), here we’re talking about neuroreality, a direct biological connection, total symbiosis. Nanobots will repair our cells from within, and even record our memories. We will be able to communicate telepathically: synthetic telepathy in the form of electrical signals, of course, not words.
Words, meanwhile, will nearly all be lost, given that languages—the seven thousand languages in the world today, and all their immense vocabularies—will die out: English, Spanish, and Mandarin, along with a few mash-ups between them (see Spanglish), will likely be the only languages spoken in the world.
And . . .
Our memory capacity will increase. We’ll communicate through neural augmentation and brain implants. We may even manage to teleport ourselves. These scenarios aren’t plot points in a science-fiction film. They’re right around the corner.
As for writing? What role will it play in all this? In a hundred years this book will no longer exist in printed form. Perhaps it won’t exist at all, perhaps publishing houses won’t exist, not even Farrar, Straus and Giroux. There will be no paper, no more newspapers. In a hundred years none of you will be here, and neither will I, and no one, except maybe some retro bibliophile, will be able to check to see if these prophecies came true.
Some things die hard, however, and we call these things emotions. And I’m not talking about emojis. I’m talking again about our brain and our evolution.
For 200 million years now our emotional brain has been a work in progress. Our “rational” cortex, our cognitive apparatus, came later, around 1.8 million years ago. And our linguistic-symbolic development is even more recent. Emotions are as old as the earth, the most essential part of our human existence.
They come before language. Fear, rage, desire, pain. We must communicate them, to survive, to unite, to move forward. We must preserve them, in some way, for the future. We can entrust them to voice messages, videos, audio articles, the audiobooks we’re all obsessed with now. We can consign them to the voice of time. But time is a breath, ethereal, ephemeral, made of air.
Think again of the images from forty thousand years ago. The Paleolithic symbols in caves. We can still see them. They’re still there. The evidence of someone’s emotions, perhaps someone who wished to be remembered forever. As long as there are emotions, there will be written letters.
Living letters.