Emoji didn’t succeed because they were a language, they succeeded because they’re not a language. Rather than try to compete with words on their home turf, emoji added in a whole new system to represent a whole other layer of meaning. We already had a way of representing individual sounds, in the form of letters, and we’ve been developing the system for representing tone of voice using our existing punctuation and capitalization that we talked about in the previous chapter. So emoji and other pictorial elements are filling the third important pillar of communication: a way of representing our gestures and physical space.
We don’t know whether emoji per se will be popular in future centuries or are merely a passing fad. But my prediction is that, having unlocked a way of conveying gesture and intention in writing, we’ll continue caring about digital embodiment, even though we may very well change the specific tools we use to project it. To be sure, there are differences between gesture and emoji as well: gestures are good at movement, while emoji are better at detail. Don’t ask me how I’d convey a birthday in gesture or the way to throw a frisbee in emoji—I really have no idea. But their core function, the way that they fit into our systems of communication, has too many similarities to be an accident.
Thinking of emoji as gestures helps put things into perspective: if we’re tempted to start thinking, “If words were good enough for Shakespeare, why aren’t they good enough for us?” we can pause and realize that plain words weren’t actually good enough for Shakespeare. A lot of what Shakespeare wrote was plays, designed not to be read on a page, but to be performed by people. How many of us have struggled through reading Shakespeare as a disembodied script in school, only to see him come to life in a well-acted production? Or, to take a more contemporary example, when the long-awaited, next-generation story Harry Potter and the Cursed Child came out in book form, it got mixed reviews. People who saw the play generally really enjoyed it, but people who just read the script were more polarized. If Shakespeare and J. K. Rowling can’t make disembodied dialogue feel natural, what hope is there for J. Q. Notapoet, our average internet user?
Emoji and gesture also share a murky relationship with “universal” meaning. They both cross boundaries that plain words don’t: I’d certainly rather be dropped on an island where I didn’t share a language with anyone if I could use gesture or emoji. But pantomime and cartoon pictures will only get me so far, and at the same time, there are plenty of things about both that are culturally specific, whether that’s different obscene gestures or illustrations of objects that are only common in Japan. Even the idea of pictorial communication is culturally bound: people tend to tell emoji “stories” in left-to-right or right-to-left order depending on the direction of their writing systems, and those who are illiterate have a difficult time with linear picture stories or simplified emoji-like drawings at all. And neither pictures nor gestures are useful for one of the most powerful features of language: its ability to talk about ideas that are hard to visualize. Nuclear scientists, for example, have had an incredibly difficult time communicating the fairly simple concept “Danger: There is nuclear waste here” in a way that will continue to make sense for the next ten thousand years. Circle with a slash? Nope, could be a sideways hamburger. Skull and crossbones? Nope, could refer to the Day of the Dead or pirates. Much as we might wish it to be otherwise, there’s just no panacea for universal communication.
This comparison between gesture and emoji can help us with more immediate decisions, however. Judges and juries are grappling with emoji sensemaking, according to law professor Eric Goldman, in much the same way as they’ve long had to interpret gestures and punctuation. Courts have already deliberated over whether a raised hand is a threat, or if a particular handshape is a gang sign, or what exactly was meant by a particular comma. It’s by similar logic that a court interpreted a smiley emoticon in one context as indicating that something was a joke, not to be taken seriously as evidence, while another court interpreted a smiley emoticon in a different context as merely a symbol of happiness. In a list of emoji examples from court cases compiled by US criminal justice news organization The Marshall Project, emoji are often treated as a clue regarding the intent of the writer, such as whether a gun emoji can indicate a genuine threat, whether a face with tongue stuck out emoji is enough to indicate that a violent post is a joke, or whether sharing a violent video with smile and heart emoji indicates a “twisted delight” in it.
Expanding our tools for conveying our intentions may even make us better at reading other people’s mental states by giving us more practice taking them on. If we look at the history of literature, medieval and classical texts simply described what the characters did (wring their hands, tear their hair) rather than their mental states, while early modern stories started incorporating monologues where characters spoke their thought processes out loud (think Hamlet or Juliet wondering about death). With the invention of the novel, omniscient narrators could hint at mental states that even the characters didn’t fully understand, while twentieth-century modernist writers tried to evoke the actual experience of a particular mental state in the reader. Sure enough, researchers have found that people who read a lot of fiction are better at understanding mental states than those who read primarily nonfiction or don’t read at all. In the twenty-first century, we’re going a step further: emoji and the rest make us not just readers of mental states, but writers of them. The younger Internet People who complain that their parents don’t understand how their tone comes across in text may be onto something important.
The idea of mental states can reassure anyone who’s worried about emoji or textspeak creeping into student essays. Even as mental states have gotten more deep and subtle in literature and informal writing, we’ve kept essays around as a formal genre for other purposes. No one is writing in a formal context, “omggg wtf the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell ,” any more than a hundred years ago people were writing, “Oh my heavenly stars, the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell, isn’t that just the bee’s knees!!!!” Even if you’re the kind of nerdy scientist who’s genuinely that excited about basic mitochondria facts, you’re still supposed to pretend you’re a serious researcher if you want to get published in a serious journal. The convention for formal writing is that it’s unemotive and disembodied.
But formality doesn’t have to be a requirement for all kinds of writing. Many areas of our lives, like clothing styles and eating styles, run the full gamut from formal to informal with many gradations in between. How marvelous it is that writing styles can do the same! What we’re arriving at, between typography and visuals, is a flexible set of ways to communicate our intentions and share space online. Not everyone uses every option: some people love emoji, some people prefer old-school emoticons or abbreviations, some people would rather do it with comedic timing in their vocabulary, linebreaks, and punctuation. But everyone needs something, or you’re going to indeed find cyberspace “alienating and unfulfilling.” We take the expression of mental states so much for granted in informal speech, that oldest and first-learned form of language, that it takes the dramatic expansion of a new genre, informal writing, to make us pay attention to it again. But now that we’ve set up our expanded emotional palette, we need to give it a canvas to paint on. Let’s expand our focus and have a look at conversations.
Chapter 6
How Conversations Change
You probably don’t remember learning how to walk, which makes it easy to think that it was obvious. But have you ever seen a computer trying to figure it out? In one video, a blobby computer-simulated humanoid manages to figure out how to walk on two legs, but only by rapidly pumping its fist up and down at the same time. In another, a metallic humanoid exoskeleton sways dangerously to the side with each faltering step, prompting its surrounding humans to hold their open hands a few inches away in case they need to rescue the expensive equipment from falling. The four-legged robots do okay, but the two-legged ones
are still not as good at walking as an average human three-year-old is, over twenty years after a computer beat a human grandmaster at chess in the mid-1990s.
When we think about the kind of language that’s difficult, we often think of soaring public speeches or a poem that punches us in the feels—the chess of language. We’ve known how to display this kind of language on screens for a long time, before computers at all: just roll the video, just display some lines of text. What’s harder is the walking of language: our ordinary conversations, which we learned and forgot learning at the same time as we were learning and forgetting learning how to walk. Like how we don’t pay much attention to our gestures or tone of voice until we need to manage them electronically, the back-and-forth of conversation is surprisingly complex when we try to filter it through a different medium.
But we walk the same way that humans have walked for generations; if you want to know the rules of chess, you can consult a rulebook which simply lists them all. Conversation is different. Its norms are more fluid, emerging from constant negotiation between its participants. And especially when it comes to conversations that happen via technology, its norms are subject to a lot of change.
The telephone was the first major technological rupture for conversation. (Okay, the telegraph was also incredibly weird, but it never made it to mainstream in-home use.) So far, we’ve gotten away with mostly ignoring phone calls or lumping them into speech in general when talking about styles of communication, but for talking about how conversational norms change, the landline telephone is absolutely critical. The phone was as revolutionary for conversation as the internet was: before the phone, you either had conversations that were spoken and in real time with people right next to you, or written and far away and very slow. When the telephone came, all of a sudden you could have real-time conversations with people who were far away, at any time of the day or night. A whole series of norms, established through centuries of gradual normalization of the written word and millennia of face-to-face conversation, were completely upended. This caused a lot of problems that were similar to the “internet problems” we’re encountering now. We have extensive documentation of the rocky moments as the phone spread through society, but they’ve faded from living memory. Even Non Internet People take phones very much for granted. So the telephone is a useful model to keep in mind as we begin to take the internet for granted as well.
It’s easy to celebrate the expansion of the emotional landscape in informal writing—Yay ironic capitals! Yay emoji! Yay gifs! With conversations, there’s a tendency to do the opposite: to mythologize a golden age when people had “real” conversations, to wish that telephone calls and emails and Facebook posts were still exciting, rather than tedious games of telephone tag and an overflowing inbox and happy birthday messages from people we’ve forgotten even existed, to want all our friends to join a new social platform only until people we don’t like are there, not recognizing that the people who spoil the network for us are someone else’s long-awaited friends.
Let’s start with a different thesis: for any type of conversation, people are doing it because it meets a need for them. It might not be a need we remember. It might not be a need we have ourselves. It might not be a need we want to acknowledge. But often, it’s a need that we can learn to understand if we start looking for it. When we try to understand the needs that now obsolete communications technologies were meeting, it can help us understand the different stakes of the present. It’s too hard to start with current battlegrounds, with questions about the correct email salutation or whether it’s rude to answer a text when you’re talking with someone else. We’ve already chosen our sides on those issues. But if we can look at the obsolete controversies of the past, seek to understand what people were aiming for, and realize that the uproar about them seems faintly ridiculous in hindsight, perhaps we can view the controversies of the present with a more compassionate lens. Perhaps we can marvel at how interesting it is when there are several different norms in play, rather than grumbling at how other people are different and wrong. The technologies we now decry as new and inferior are going to be someone else’s nostalgia trip; the technologies we now nostalgize were someone else’s new and inferior versions.
Email and Phatic Expressions
When I was in high school, I had a linguistic game I used to play on my unsuspecting schoolmates. Moving through the hallways between classes, we’d normally call out to the people we saw every day, “Hi, how’s it going?” or “Hey, what’s up?” But I practiced giving the opposite response without skipping a beat. To “What’s up?” I’d answer, “Good, how’re you?” while to “How’s it going?” I’d say, “Not much, what’s up with you?” What surprised and delighted me every time is that people never seemed to notice. As long as I could pull it off smoothly, people were perfectly content to accept the “wrong” reply to their greetings—it was only when I faltered that people pulled up short. (Try it yourself sometime!) I didn’t understand why, any more than I understood why there were several pairs of greetings that were made out of different words but meant essentially the same thing when taken as a whole, and eventually I chalked it up to one of life’s (and my own) little eccentricities.
As I learned more linguistics, I realized two things. First, that this is eminently normal budding linguist behavior, and second, that linguistics had a reason for why my greeting mismatch experiment worked. These social phrases are known as phatic expressions, and their meaning is more about the context you say them in than the sum of their individual words. “How’s it going?” and “What’s up?” have the same function: they both acknowledge the presence of someone you already know in a way that’s slightly more elaborate than a simple greeting (“Hi!”) but doesn’t go so far as to be an original conversation. So their rote answers are also functionally interchangeable, as long as you say them in the seamless manner of someone following a social script. You can even play around with them still further. I’ve occasionally, accidentally, replied, “Good, how are you?” to other phatic greetings, such as “Hello” (without being asked how I was), or gone through the exchange an extra time (“Hi, how’re you?” “Good, how’re you?” “Good, how’re you— Wait, um . . .”). If one person falters, the whole thing falls apart and becomes literal again. Otherwise, we’re perfectly content to see the meaning behind the social niceties and ignore the actual words.
But phatic expressions are made up of ordinary words. At one point, they did mean what they seem to mean, nothing more and nothing less. Which leaves a person wondering, how does a literal expression become phatic? And can it ever cross back over, from phatic to literal again? The changing norms of technologically mediated conversations allow us to watch these exact shifts happen.
One such shift happened as a result of the telephone. The greetings popular in the 1800s were based on knowing who you were addressing and when you were addressing them: “Good morning, children.” “Good afternoon, Doctor.” But when you pick up a ringing telephone, you have no idea who’s calling (during the many decades before caller ID), and you can’t even be sure whether you share a time of day with them. The teleconnected world desperately needed a neutral option. The two most prominent solutions were “Hello,” championed by Thomas Edison, and “Ahoy,” championed by Alexander Graham Bell. At the time, both had a similar meaning: they were used to attract attention rather than as a greeting (“hello” has the same origins as “holler”). Why would you need to attract attention? Some early phones were set up as a line that was just open the whole time, with no bell to ring when someone was calling, so “hello” was like calling out to someone in the room next door. Even though we did end up with call bells, early phone books provided model dialogues to new phone customers unsure about proper phone etiquette. One early manual suggested beginning with “a firm and cheery ‘hulloa’” or “What is wanted?” and closing with “That is all.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, “What is wanted?” and “That is all”
didn’t catch on, but “hello” did, and quickly spread beyond the phone as an all-purpose greeting.* Vestiges of hello’s attention-getting function can still be heard anytime you experience a faulty connection, however; you can say “Hello?” mid-conversation to test the signal, but “Hi?” somehow doesn’t sound right there. (“Goodbye,” on the other hand, has been around since at least the sixteenth century, but perhaps innovation was less necessary in closing a phone call, since you already knew who you were talking with.)
But there was a period of friction, when “hello” was spreading beyond its summoning origins to become a general-purpose greeting, and not everyone was a fan. I was reminded of this when watching a scene in the BBC television series Call the Midwife, set in the late 1950s and early 1960s, where a younger midwife greets an older one with a cheerful “Hello!” “When I was in training,” sniffs the older character, “we were always taught to say ‘good morning,’ ‘good afternoon,’ or ‘good evening.’ ‘Hello’ would not have been permitted.” To the younger character, “hello” has firmly crossed the line into a phatic greeting. But to the older character, or perhaps more accurately to her instructors as a young nurse, “hello” still retains an impertinent whiff of summoning. Etiquette books as late as the 1940s were still advising against “hello,” but in the mouth of a character from the 1960s, being anti-hello is intended to make her look like a fussbudget, especially playing for an audience of the future who’s forgotten that anyone ever objected to “hello.”
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