Communicating With Emojis: Kress Ch. 3 Response

In this post, I want to focus on Kress' discussion of how styles and features of writing develop around the medium they are written in, and how, then, changing technologies result in changed writing. Kress talks about how the prominence of the physical book shaped the way we’ve written for centuries. For example, he says the confines of the size of the paper and the way the pages are bound together have caused the “logic of writing” to be “temporal/sequential” (Kress 14).

However, as books are increasingly replaced with screens, Kress predicts the way we write will significantly change alongside our communication technologies. To illustrate this, I want to include a screenshot I took once of a text I received from my dad:

The Kress reading reminded me of some grumblings I've heard from pro-alphabetic text traditionalists that kids these days are ruining the English language with their outlandish use of emojis (and general text lingo). Some people seem to fear our speech will be completely taken over by emoji use, and we'll digress to a society where everyone communicates via cute images of bald, round heads that express our feelings and thoughts.

Kress highlights this fear in a general sense through his discussion of how screens are changing the way we communicate. When I received that text from my dad I couldn't stop laughing, largely because I never thought I'd live to see the day when he used a smiley face in a text, but also because the way he referred to his smiley face as a "non alpha numeric character" seemed to completely counteract the progressiveness of using one.

I'm not sure I agree we will one day digress to communicating solely through emojis, but Kress does have a very valid point when he talks about the emerging centrality of the image in writing. Perhaps emojis are simply an extension of this phenomenon.