It Goes Without Saying
The written word and the old-fashioned conversation are under threat, as a generation raised on digital communication is Instagramming and Snapchatting at a feverish pace.
Grindr is a meeting app for gays, and finding the usual set of emoji insufficient, it will offer a set of Gaymoji — 500 icons that represent thoughts and activities that seem funnier and less complicated when cartoons replace words.
“Almost 20 percent of all Grindr messages” already use emoji, its creative director, Landis Smithers, told The Times. “There’s this shift going on culturally, and we need to follow the users where they are taking us.”
Included in the first set of 100 free Gaymoji symbols are rainbow unicorns, bears, otters and handcuffs. An additional 400 are there for those willing to pay $3.99 for icons in categories like Mood, Objects, Body, and Dating and Sex.
“The core of what’s happening with emojis, or Gaymojis, is that they take some of the pressure off coming up with something to say in the windowless box that is an online conversation,” Gretchen McCulloch, who is writing a book about how the internet is changing language, told The Times.
Snap, the parent company of the app Snapchat, which allows users to share ephemeral messages and pictures, is betting on the dominance of visual culture. Its initial public offering in early March raised $3.4 billion, for a company that may never earn a profit.
Snap claims to be a camera company. Farhad Manjoo, writing in The Times, said that claim should be taken seriously, not literally. Its goal is to have its software and hardware make the camera as big a part of our lives as the keyboard.
Initially, the internet turned us into bloggers, emailers and tweet- ers. We ditched phone calls for texts. When the smartphone camera came along a decade ago, humans could take pictures and transmit them immediately.
Snapchat realized we could also use pictures to communicate.
“The rising dependence on cameras is changing our language,” Mr. Manjoo wrote. “Other than in faceto-face communication, we used to talk primarily in words. Now, more and more, from GIFs to emoji, selfies to image-macro memes and live video, we talk in pictures.”
Oren Soffer, a professor of communications at the Open University of Israel, argued that Snapchat returns us to a time before the printing press, when we communicated orally. The disappearing photos we share make Snapchat more like talking than writing, Professor Soffer contends.
“What Snapchat is attempting is to apply technology to visual products to create a fading-away effect — just as spoken words fade away in the air after utterance,” he wrote.
Still, writing is better for conveying a lot of information concisely and accurately, Mr. Manjoo argues. And there is one place where pictures will never replace words: the dictionary.
Merriam-Webster, the oldest dictionary publisher in America, has not ignored the social media revolution. Its editors star in online videos, and its Twitter feed often goes viral with its witty and political commentary on the news.
Kory Stamper, a lexicographer there, has written a new book, “Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries,” about her personal experiences of the lexicographic life and the intellectual challenge of writing dictionaries.
Ms. Stamper calls it “a love letter to dictionaries in English,” but there are ambivalent feelings.
“People have so many fears about what their use of language says about them,” she told The Times. “When you talk to people about dictionaries, they often start talking about other things, like which words they love, and which words they hate. And it’s perfectly fine to hate parts of the language.”