Are Instant Messaging Emoticons the New Age's Hieroglyphics?

Thanks, Joe! I'm glad to see this very interesting discussion continue.

As an educator, I'm particularly interested in the effects that the developments you identify may have on the ways in which we teach reading - and interpretive skills more generally.

It seems to me that we process print texts in a different way from visual images. We're trained, from an early age, to accept and to conform, when we speak and write, to patterns of linguistic signification that have been codified and are policed by linguists, dictionary-makers, and English teachers like me.

A particular word, when we hear it or read it (or write it), is already linked by social convention to a particular, often highly specific referent, and more often than not we accept that linkage of signifier to signified as unproblematic.

Visual images (paintings, drawings, sculptures) seem to me to covey meaning in other, more ambiguous ways, at least until the point at which they too are codified into a rigid iconographic system (a development, perhaps, that separates Egytpian hieroglyphics or Mayan glyps from earlier, pre-literate pictographs).

While particularly realistic pictures may seem unproblematically to signify specific objects in the world, many (perhaps most) pictures are to some degree both abstract and impressionistic, and we don't have rigid visual codes for deciphering visual images to the same degree that we have stable, conventional strategies for "decoding" the reference of words.

What this seems to me to imply is that a language rich in pictures, at least until the point (how distant will that point be?) at which those pictures are standardized and assigned stable, mutually agreed-upon meanings, will be more ambiguous, and its interpretation more subjective, than language as we have known it lately.

Heretofore, we have begun by teaching people to "write" as a process of encoding and to "read" as a process of decoding, using a one-to-one process of substituting specific signifiers for specific signifieds. It's in higher order reading and writing that we begin to emphasize the ambiguity implicit in the linguistic sign and to acknowledge that words may refer to multiple referents, without any clear method of determining which signified is the "correct" one. One works one's way up from experiencing language as unambiguous to appreciating and then exploiting its ambiguity - although many people seem to be profoundly unhappy when they confront the ambiguity of language.

A language replete with pictures that have not yet unambiguously been defined - assigned an agreed-upon meaning - might force us to confront that ambiguity up front, to experience earlier and more consciously that "reading" is not so much a matter of decoding as of assigning meaning to the text, even making meaning in or of the text. This, in turn, could have significant implications for the ways in which we develop creativity and experience the authority both of texts and of ourselves as readers(readers, in a sense, would be forced to become writers as they read, forming for themselves the bonds between the signifiers provided by the pictorial text and the referents of that text).

See what happens when an English professor starts writing? Sorry to be so long-winded!