In France, we are passionate for the debate on inclusive writing, without seeing that it is like being interested in a frog in a pond, which will soon be overwhelmed by a tsunami.
Because what is at stake on the global scale at this moment, could just simply be, the disappearance of the writing of all languages. And even, ultimately, of speech. Both are replaced by a nonverbal communication, written symbols, whose sketch is constituted by emoticons.
First, because we talk less and less one to another: phones are no longer used to talk but to send messages. And even in offices, colleagues would rather communicate in a written form than exchange at the coffee machine. Conversation with the other is perceived as an aggression, an invasion of one’s private field; while written words has the benefit of protecting privacy, of letting the other free to answer as it pleases him, at the desired time, without revealing any particular emotion. The written message is thus set up as the highest form of politeness; whereas the unexpected interpellation appears as the superior form of rudeness.
Secondly, because in the writing field, and in particular for messages sent with mobile phones or other similar devices, exchanges make less and less use of any language, whatever this language may be; because they all are quite complex to write, and because their grammatical sophistications are not necessary to be understandable. So, more and more people are using, instead of words, abbreviations and phonetic writings in these messages. In particular, a written communication mode that does not even use letters is witnessed to settle in: pictograms. You would call them smiley in French; emoji in Japanese; emoticons in English. Emoji meaning, as a matter of fact, “pictogram” in Japanese.
This communication mode, which appeared in France in 1982, and in 1998 in the United States and in Japan, is no longer anecdotal. It is now codified by a Californian non-profit organization, Unicode, which approves pictograms that are accepted by all global networks. These pictograms tell emotions, feelings, facts. Their meaning is immediate. No need for a dictionary or grammar to understand them. They allow people with relatively small vocabulary to say much more, and much faster. There is no more need to know spelling or to speak a language to communicate. New pictograms constantly appear, designed by an artificial intelligence. Today, Unicode references 1920 pictograms, in 5 skin colours.
And they are more and more used: it seems that more than 5% of messages on the internet, already contain at least one pictogram. And I wait, unless it already exists, for the first novel that would entirely be written in emoticons.
Pictograms are still far from constituting an utter substitute for languages: they make it difficult to distinguish whether someone speaks about himself or about someone else; they do not have the same meaning from one culture to another; and we can hardly build whole sentences with them, but do we still need them?
These pictograms are important signs from the future. They constitute, like the bitcoin does, a dimension of the globalization in the making: money, like language, is attached to a territory; and as such, it disappears. Similarly, in a globalized world, it is not English, nor Chinese that will replace other languages, emoticons will. While people will keep on speaking languages they will not write anymore.
I don’t judge, I notice. As must have noted, with nostalgia, terror or gluttony, those who saw in Egypt, the last hieroglyphs disappearing, replaced, at the turning point of our era, by demotic and then by the Greek alphabet. No doubt have we thus lost as much as what we would lose if pictograms indeed replaced words. And if conversations indeed left room for silence.