 introduction. So you all know my name, I work for Adobe, and I'm deeply interested in language, culture, type, and these days emoji, and these are the things that I want to talk to you about today. So one of the things that I wanted to talk about is to basically counter some of these arguments that started popping up with the advent of emoji, that emoji is destroying language. But concerns about language always have to do with our identity. And the narrative that emoji or destroying language tries to put language in a privileged position and show that the author of the previous article that I showed sees himself as part of a higher echelon of society. So narrative is always something that is very personal. And as I give my narrative today, it will say a lot about me and my point of view of the world. And in fact, the argument that emoji or destroying language is a very old argument that goes back all the way to Socrates and Plato, who told the story of the Egyptian god Thoth, who invented writing, was telling King Thamus about how wonderful his invention was, that it would make people smarter and it would improve their memories. But King Thamus counters this statement saying that writing would make people have a lot of knowledge but not very much wisdom. And this is a very old anti-technology argument where we tend to be wary of any new technology and we can either focus on their good aspects or we can focus on what we view as negative aspects. So Thamus actually said that, where Thoth said that writing would be a new magical cure Thamus saw it as a potential poison. So language all has to do with transcendence and cooperation and that's why we developed language as a species and that's one of our great strengths, is to be able to cooperate and transcend ourselves and to work together with others and language is this amazing tool that helps us to do that. And it's all built up from a basis of signals that mean various things like stop, slow down and go. And even before we evolved into modern humans, we had what were called play signals that helped us to determine the difference from aggressive play and real aggression. So these play signals were later becoming humans laughter and smiling. So this speaks to the importance of gesture as part of our communication and in fact modern studies show that up to 70 percent of our communication with others has to do with nonverbal content. So things like gesture and tone of voice and touch. These are all important aspects of communication and other studies also have shown that when our ability to move is limited that also increases levels of disfluency. And this is an example of some of the earliest representative art. Once mankind was able to preserve gesture in the form of art and representations of the natural world, it allowed for them to transcend space and time. Although we may not know exactly what the people who made these paintings, how they saw the world, we can start to sense, have a sense of how they may have seen it. And this is the crux of the message that I want to point out today that although we like to make divisions such as language and emoji between script and visual representation, these things are not that different. And in fact I'm going to start with the development of the alphabet and starting with the Egyptians who saw the world in this kind of mythopoetic way, basically meaning that they made sense of the world by telling stories which is not really any different from the way we make sense of the world today. I already mentioned Thoth and how the Egyptians saw him as the creator of the alphabet. But Thoth himself is a symbol and he symbolizes human intelligence in our ability to do such things as measure, make measurements to make marks and to and writing. And as you can see here we have Thoth writing but we also see a larger version of his character so that you can see that in this particular example at the beginning of writing there's not really a big distinction between the writing and the picture carvings. They're identical, they're just on a different scale. And one of the powerful things that language does is it allows for us again to tell stories and to come up with fictions and these fictions do have impact on our realities. And in fact our language and our concept system is all based on metaphors. So even our most abstract concepts have some basis in our physical reality. So giving the history of writing here we have our friend the Ibis again and the Egyptian hieroglyphic writing system works in such a way that you'll be given the the drawing of something and then not only did they have the pictographic representation but they also had phonetics. So this is a letter, a phonetic letter and it corresponds to the Ibis that we saw in the previous slide. The name of this letter is Ib which is the name of the Ibis in Egyptian and then the early Semitic tribes took the Egyptian writing system and they adapted it for their own languages. They repurposed the Ibis here on the right for their letter bit which meant that they had to come up with another letter to represent the glottal stop sound which the letter Ib represented. So they used Alp, the head of the ox on the left to represent that glottal stop sound. Later the Phoenicians took this writing system and they simplified it. You can see the ox head on the right and the bent the house on the left and you can see that the shapes are becoming more abstract. This allowed this is two things, excuse me, simultaneously. It provided iconic abstraction which actually allowed for greater semantic expansion meaning that having a more abstract presentation allowed for these letters to encapsulate greater meaning. And this is a form of aniconism which was a trend among the earlier Semitic people that corresponds with things such as the development of monotheism and a greater identification away from the body and towards our thoughts. And the Greeks developed this to a high level in their idea of logos and you can see a corresponding visual representation where they took the Phoenician script and made it even more rationalized and simplified. So here we see the head of the ox which becomes the letter alpha and the beta which is the bet. So the names of the letters even correspond to the previous protosynactic names of letters but you don't really see an ox and you don't really see a house there anymore. Next came the Romans and this is from the Trajan inscription and now we have letter forms that are identical to the other case letters that you'll find in modern forms today. And this whole process can be summarized by this quote, this famous quote by Eric Gill. So as typographers and type designers we typically think of the Trajan column as the letters but this is actually what the Trajan column looks like. Only a very small portion of this giant monument is letters and in fact most of the Trajan column looks like this. It's more of a pictorial representation of a narrative. Later we adapted other symbols such as numbers and punctuation taking them from other cultures to help us to provide in the case of numbers even greater level of abstraction to our language and we can look at punctuation as some of the various very first forms of emoji. Things that allowed for us to start to introduce pauses and different tones of voice to writing. And so if we keep abstracting our writing we take the letter A and we turn it into unicode binary code and this is the underlying code that your computer sees when you're sending a capital letter A to someone and if we abstract it even further we can interpret the zeros as being often dark and the ones as being on and light and so the letter A can be represented this way which speaks back to seeing things in terms of opposites and binary ways of thinking. And the reason why binary thinking is so powerful is because the way the human brain works is that it we're constantly simulating our own version of reality based on the inputs that the brain is getting from our senses and in order to be efficient in doing this work our brain develops the ideas of opposites so it thinks of things in terms of up versus down white versus black happy versus sad, mind versus body, white and male versus black and female, science versus religion and in economics one of the first things that they teach you is about rationality and I'm going to have a sip of water now and rationality is this concept that we all have preferences and that we can rank those preferences and if we do a little bit of linguistic analysis we see that this is these are kind of the predominant metaphors in the English language and you can start to see some interesting patterns emerging where obviously in English we're very concerned with time and we rank things such as we talk about things such as men and children much more than we do about women and when we start to see these patterns and how we correlate things within our concept in the West we see that we tend to give preference to what we see on the top we like to identify more with our thoughts we prefer language to imagery we often see civilization as being preferable to nature and we devalue things such as emotion and magic and our feelings and this way of kind of approaching the world and kind of favoring one aspect of ourselves over another aspect or seeing someone in a way where you split their good attributes from their bad attributes is called splitting and it's usually ego response to uncertainty and this goes back to kind of making those split decisions but in this great book by Yvonne O'Harris he makes this statement that breakups are just a roadblock on the way towards unity which brings us to emoji and part of the reason why I am passionate about emoji is because I believe that it helps us to revalue our physical reality and our senses and not necessarily prioritize our concepts and our ideas and our intellect over these things. Emoji developed in a similar path to what I just showed to the Latin alphabet but it comes to us from the east so starting with the Chinese Han writing system you can see how they developed from picture writing on the top left to a more stylized character of a horse so this is a character ma in Chinese for a horse I probably used the wrong tone you can see here that how it kind of correlates to the shape of the actual horse and then we now have emoji representations of the same thing but where did emoji come from? Emoji was created by Shigitaka Kurita who developed this set of picture symbols to act as characters because as we just saw in Japanese which uses the Chinese Han symbols it's very common to use a single character to express a whole idea and that was the original intention of emoji but one of the great aspects of emoji is that it allows us to reintroduce into our communication more empathy these are some of the top metaphors that are used in emoji according to emoji tracker and you can see that these correspond with feelings of love and affection and only one or two what we commonly think of as negative emotions and so this speaks to the importance of actually what I want to say is that some people as in the title of the article at the very beginning some people want to pit emoji and language against each other but in fact when used together they help us to have a better communication and so this is just an example message that shows how the emoji can be used to kind of be a sort of emotional glue that holds things together I'm just going to skip a bit emoji also seeing things visually can help us to see some underlying biases that we may not have realized when emoji was first rolled out people immediately noticed the apple's depiction showed men is active and women is negative but now we have gender parity in emoji and this speaks to the importance of our narratives and our stories and our metaphors one of my favorite examples is how Disney switched up their narrative for what it means to be a Disney princess as someone who needs to be rescued to someone who helps heal others by acknowledging and helping them through their trauma and this non-binary view of the world is what led me to advocate for a more androgynous form of emoji I see this as to me androgyny is the transcendence of our own selves and being able to combine our masculine and feminine aspects and although I may look like and present as the emoji on the left I generally feel inside that I relate to the emoji more in the center and when I'm at my best this is my favorite emoji so thank you very much