Globalists long envisioned a deeply unified world. In the 19th century, those calling for one, integrated world could point to the pragmatic challenges of making things work to bring the planet together. New technologies in transportation and communication required technical coordination and cross-border linkages.
For the world to communicate through stunning, revolutionary developments such as the telegraph and railway, their lines had to physically connect and there needed to be mechanistic standardisation so that national systems were inter-operable. To get the trains moving and messages travelling required a degree of international collaboration.
Such challenges motivated the International Telegraph Union to form in the middle of the 19th century. Since then, telecommunication has taken the place of telegraph in its name, but the ITU remains one of the first intergovernmental organisations.
The telegraph alone led to various treaties and synchronised operational routines. Increased travel by rail and ship was one reason for the innovation of international time zones. They made travel planning feasible.
Beyond the logistical, many thought the Transatlantic telegraph would end world conflict, and give way to harmony. Some spoke of its powers in spiritual terms. Former US president James Buchanan hoped that the underwater telegraph line would “under the blessing of Heaven” produce “a bond of perpetual peace and friendship between the kindred nations”. He called it “an instrument destined by Divine Providence”.
One of the most irreconcilable differences between people, however, was language itself.
On one hand, standardisation aimed at overcoming lingual barriers that prevented things from working properly. For example, the wide adaptation of Morse code among various other proposed schemes for converting electronic impulses into text, allowed the expansion of telegraph-delivered communications. Telegraph operators had to all use the same code to relay the messages properly.
Of course, this sort of technical code would not correct the problem of language translation — how to make the meaning of the sequence of words in one language carry over into an equivalent sequence of words in a completely different language.
The effort to address problems of language difference motivated a Polish surgeon to propose a universal, supplementary language called Esperanto. Dr L. L. Zamenhof planned it as an amalgam of various languages and published it in a book, the Unua Libro, in 1887. He designed it to be easy to acquire, to communicate with people of multiple nationalities and to have it be practical and useful to masses of people. Esperanto is one of the most commonly spoken, invented languages, but only a few million actually do.
Like so many other globalist aspirations, a shared, constructed language never quite materialised as it was intended.
More recent communication technologies, from satellite to the internet, and its various platforms, are depicted as being more innovative, empowering and potentially globalising. The old barriers of language seem more easily surmountable than ever. But these, like the telegraph, are hardware mechanisms. What flows through them, the communications themselves, still face the problem Dr Zamenhof faced — the language barrier.
One answer to language gaps is in simple, expressive graphics.
Perhaps the most convincing example of a potential common language could be found in emoji, or the pictographs (pictorial symbols) that are available on email, social media and SMS messaging applications. The word “emoji” combines the Japanese words for “picture” and “letter or character”.
These colourful little images “represent things such as faces, weather, vehicles and buildings, food and drink, animals and plants, or icons that represent emotions, feelings or activities”.
The above examples come from the central planning committee of emoji, the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee, which is a component of the Unicode Technical Committee. The latter is a consortium of major tech companies, developers and others who work to develop and maintain the standards of computer-based character coding systems. The goal of the committee’s unicode authorship is to encourage international exchange and similar presentation of written texts of multiple languages and images.
It is the private sector version of the ITU in many ways, facilitating standardisation to make things work.
It turns out that the menu of emojis available for any intersystem communications — for example text messaging between Apple and Samsung phones — requires technical coordination, as well as complex and often contested procedures for considering and vetting proposed icons for the shared catalogues.
Unicode development was essential for getting Apple to adopt emoji when the iPhone entered the Japanese mobile phone market in 2008. The US-based company founded out that having emoji functions was necessary to being successful in Japan. Apple later adapted it to the US a few years later in a case of reverse globalisation.
These seemingly simple images represent the great promise of simple graphic design units to communicate through language and literacy barriers.
In a thought-provoking essay, Tim Peters raised the possibility of emoji being used in novels. Reviewing a book the artist Xu Bing wrote using emoji-like icons in the late 1980s, Peters observed that icons could enable writers to mix both the “efficient, denotative communication” of tight prose with “what’s good about comics”, the visual stimuli.
Multiple phenotypes
The prominence of simple icons in transportation areas, airports, airplanes, roads and so forth, are testament to the power of direct and efficient signs. They tell multi-lingual passers-by exactly where to find what they need.
In the case of mobile or social media applications, it is the signs that do the travelling. Communication scholars have long fixated on the power of the mind to travel “psychically” through media. Experiencing other people and places through communication could broaden the mind. Could emojis do the same, open up a terrain of international exchange?
The technical nature of emojis as the products of Unicode cannot mask the various differences that exist beyond language. We’ve seen how awkwardly the matters of skin colour and race representation have been approached through emoji design. It took years for the consortium to offer multiple phenotypes, rather than what the largely white programmers presumed was a race-neutral yellow tint. Even then, depicting racial groups through simple graphics in ways that do not reproduce caricatures has proven difficult, and controversial.
The idea that emoji could be a shared language for inter-cultural communication is beleaguered by numerous other obstacles.
The same emojis have taken on divergent meanings. A study found that people disagree widely on what the same image refers to. For example, the emoji of two hands together is used by some to denote praying, while others see clapping. This can easily result in confusion or offence, particularly if the message comes off as insensitive.
In some instances, people use icons ironically, or in ways counter to their intended meaning, including mundane fruits apparently standing in for reproductive organs.
There are technical failures, as well. Systematic programming designs meant that one system user’s emoji choice could translate as a very different image on another system. Google’s toothy smiley face, for example, appears as a discomforted grimace on an iPhone.
Shigetaka Kurita, a pioneer of emoji in Japan, criticised the Unicode emojis that many in the West use. They are vastly different from what he intended. Speaking to Matt Alt, he said he wanted emoji iconography to function less as “e [picture]” and more as “moji [letter].” They were supposed to translate literally, unambiguously and directly into meaningful, communicative units. The emoji as they are popularised are like “decorations,” not “tools for communication, the same regardless of who used them”. They are too intricate and over-aestheticised, rendering them open to interpretation and therefore not suitable substitutes for text.
There is a deeper problem with the claim that emoji can be language. Small signs cannot really reproduce the range of expression that words — or even larger art — can convey. Letters are signs of course, but the construction of them into words has hundreds of years of evolution in definitional specificity behind them. They are much more adaptive and contextual than are graphical images. Emoji could never replicate the thickness or interpretive extent of a great work. Nor can miniature art really power our senses or capture our imagination as traditional art work can. Miniaturisation entails losing a lot of expressive potency.
Emoji travel internationally for the same reason action movies do — their simplicity. Both work best when the plot is simple and the characters are one-dimensional.
But their real value is how efficiently they can substitute for many more words in a short amount of time. It may be quicker to produce the happy face then to text to someone “I’m happy”. The trade-off is that their emotional currency is canned, which arguably cheapens the underlying emotions they are intended to represent — unless they instigate further communication. The risk is that they remain as superficial utterances.
Just because emoji fall far short of Dr Zamenhof’s aspirations to boost language interchange towards globalist integration, it does not mean they are devoid of value. They are fun, entertaining and add to the quick-paced correspondence of our day. They infuse the texture to our exchanges, adding dimensions of figurative expression, from cheeky humour and inside jokes to the light visual touches of sincerely placed signs of affection. As decorative flourishes on our quick communications, they enrich them.
Will Youmans is an assistant professor at George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs.
