As a writer and a teacher of writing, I worry constantly about the death of writing, and I worry that emoji are leading the charge.
The smartphone has really enabled the use of these pictures-embedded-in-text. Emoji now range from simple smiley faces to eggplants and airplanes, skyscrapers and poop.
As young people increasingly learn not from books but from YouTube videos and navigate not from maps but from simple GPS directions, it’s easy to make the logical leap: emoji will kill the written word once and for all.
But there’s no indication that language itself is dying, and pictographic communication is nothing new: ideograms have held many Asian languages in good stead for thousands of years, and hieroglyphs were good enough for whole epochs of Egyptian history. And the rebus, a visual puzzle in which pictures stand in for spoken sounds, has been around since at least the middle ages.
Radio and television were all thought to spell the death of text, yet it has remained viable as these other media have declined.
But what we lose when we lose text is nuance and precision: juxtaposition of images can say many things; however, the difference between the prepositions at and in is substantial, and such concepts are hard to get across with a string of cartoon pictures on a tiny screen.
As long as such distinctions are necessary, the written word will have a use, even if only among scholars and the clergy.
