The Reliability of Typed Word
How reliable is anything we “say” electronically?
I think we can all agree that receiving a text from a friend saying “It’ll all be alright” versus that friend saying that in-person whilst tackling you in a spine-crushing hug are two very different things. Why is one arguably more reliable than the other?
I’ve made the argument recently that much of the visual culture we consume — books, articles, text messages, cats scared of cucumbers GIFs — become vehicles for experiencing different emotions that may not be intrinsically ours– the most difficult of which is empathy. For (an obscure) example, Kikuji Kawada, a member of the post-WWII Japanese photography movement, created The Map, a masterwork depicting Hiroshima following nuclear fallout. The raw grit of the scenes, depicting half-human grease shadows along the walls, bottle caps and other remnants of normal life, function as a doorway into another affect, much in the same way watching Netflix allows us to become emotionally invested in experiences that are not ours.
Cut from the cloth of Provoke magazine, Kawada prescribed to the idea of images as irreversible materiality, not quite language but not void of meanings that can be transcribed through looking. “We are adrift in an era without courage, ambition, action, or even beautiful memories,” Kawada claimed. “Ask! Today, where is our map?” The act of looking is as much an act of travel as is empathy, which comes from the Greek empatheia — em (into) and pathos (pain). Leslie Jamison writes in her essays about empathy that,
“It suggests you enter another person’s pain [another symbolic anatomy of pain] as you’d enter another country.”
Thus, the imagery in Kawada’s photobook has a larger reach, and acts cross-culturally to further its message of suffering and silence.
A far cry from mirror-touch synaesthesia where the mirror neurons in the brains of some people –and to a lesser degree in all of us — simulate the exact sensations they are witness to, how are people therefore supposed to consume and interpret images? (http://www.npr.org/2015/01/30/382453493/mirror-touch) How reliable are certain words or the lexicon of emojis in conveying meaning? What if there is no emoji for what you’re feeling and trying to convey over iMessage or text? For example, Alice Robb published an article assessing how emojis affect our emotions especially in relationships. She writes:
“A few weeks ago, after I said goodbye to a friend who was moving across the country, I texted her an emoji of a crying face. She replied with an image of chick with its arms outstretched. This exchange might have been heartfelt. It could have been ironic. I’m still not really sure.” https://newrepublic.com/article/118562/emoticons-effect-way-we-communicate-linguists-study-effects
For a language or system of characters to be reliable they must mean the same (or nearly the same) thing to all users. For example, the McGill Pain Questionaire (Wall & Melzack) broke ground as a (more) reliable tool for assessing the perception of pain and brought clinical practice incrementally closer to achieving a 100% reliable subjective measure.
Therefore, the flexibility of interpretation of what people type online — and even to say to your face — makes communication much more nuanced and convoluted.
All of this is evidenced by interview styles relying on in person personality assessments, such as the Myers-Briggs Type Inventories, based on the personality theories of Carl Jung. Because, as we all know (some of us the hard way), is that anyone can say anything in the moment and not mean it. Diagnostic tools such as those used in interviews try to get a robust impression of what kind of person the prospective employee is, all the while checking for inconsistencies and deviations from the “type” someone wishes to embody. In a world moving away from face-to-face interactions, however, there is no reliable measure for truth in type or the validity of emojis.
Let’s face it. We all know when a friend sends a crying face they are probably not actually crying, but what if they are? We’ve categorically misread the interaction. With 1,620 emojis available for IOS 9.1 models, it is not impossible to believe some things become lost in translation. Don’t believe me? Consult: http://emojipedia.org/faq/
All of this makes me wonder…If photos can substitute language without becoming a new form of language, why can’t emojis masquerade as monologues, because language itself has no better metaphor for the space in which photos trigger incommunicable, potentially dishonest emotions?
Someone needs to create a “22 and anxious about the future” emoji, and then maybe we can consider it a reliable language tool.
