Joanna Gray
Joanna Gray is a writer and confidence coach.
One of the markers future historians will use when describing the New Dark Ages will be the collapse in the use of the alphabet in favour of ‘Yookay Hieroglyphics’. A demoralising development has emerged: a whole new form of pictographic language whereby children and young adults engage in hours-long online conversations with each other without the need for any letters, texts or words. Such conversations largely occur on gaming platforms, Snapchat and WhatsApp, and mark a classic regressive step in civilisational decline.
Like the medieval laity who relied on church wall paintings and stained glass to learn stories, a growing proportion of our current population is now using only pictographic communication. This time, there is no divine knowledge behind the imagery – just inane slop. I shall try to use words to describe this new pictographic language that groups of teenagers I work with have shared with me. When first shown, I felt like Howard Carter entering Tutankhamun’s tomb and waving a torch at the walls of hieroglyphics in wonderment. Yookay Hieroglyphics are read vertically from top to bottom. If drawn on Snapchat, they often instantly disappear on reading or after 31 days, making linguistic analysis particularly fraught.
A useful starting point when attempting to read Yookay Hieroglyphics is to think of the wonderfully coloured whizzy strip of cherries, bananas, apples, horseshoes, numbers, etc., on a slot machine. Reams and reams of such images are being sent from one person to another within microseconds. It often begins with one pictographic innovator (teenager) photographing their face and sending their image; their friend replies with their face; what then follows is a rapid exchange of images from one to another, creating a roll of vertically read hieroglyphics: distorted face, laughing emoji, pic of pet, pet pic distorted, laughing face, feeling sick emoji, question mark, toilet gif, sick emoji, prayer emoji, pic of dragon, happy face, pic of person smiling, distorted pic, AI-ed moving image of that pic, cat video, pic of nails, nail art inspo, gif witch nails, cross face, face with witch filter on, lol emoji, pic of face with wizard filter, pic of wizard distorted, instantly made sticker of that image, lol emoji, red laser coming out of wizard eyes filter, OMG emoji… and on and on and on and on and on.
Because I am not of the emerging linguist tribe, I will be unable to fully convey the nuances and depth of the meaning in this sample conversation – indeed a paper has concluded that emoji-based language is more layered in adolescents than in adults.
At present there is no urgent academic inquiry into the displacement of alphabetic literacy in favour of pictographic communication, it being viewed as a complementary form of cultural shorthand. And while most of us will enhance a WhatsApp message with a pulsing red heart or crossed fingers, depending on the content, we don’t conduct entire conversations in hieroglyphics, as I have witnessed.
For those of us who still use alphabetic forms of communication, it is worth remembering that 25 per cent of children leave primary school functionally unable to read or write, 40 per cent of students fail their English GCSE and 40 per cent of adults have not read a single book in the past year. With voice recognition and voice-to-text technology, it is more than possible to pass easily through life without the need to read or write. My first job was as a checkout girl in Superdrug and I occasionally had to explain to shoppers which bottle was shampoo and which one conditioner, realising later that they couldn’t read. Today, the illiterate can simply ask Siri to order online or point their phone at the bottle on the shelf and the phone will tell them what it is.
Concurrently, the growing popularity of long-form podcasts suggests to me that we are abandoning the historically unusual mass literacy of the 19th and 20th centuries and returning to an oral and visual society. In c890, in the preface to Gregory’s Pastoral Care, Alfred the Great wrote:
So general was its decay in England that there were very few on this side of the Humber who could understand their rituals in English, or translate a letter from Latin into English; and I believe that there were not many beyond the Humber. There were so few of them that I cannot remember a single one south of the Thames when I came to the throne.
How long will it be before we need an Alfred the Great of our own? Or in our new hieroglyphics:
⏳❓ ➡️ 👥🙏 🤴👑 👨🏫🇬🇧📖🔄 ➡️ 🏠👈
- ⏳❓ = How long?
- 👥🙏 = we need
- 🤴👑 = a king
- 👨🏫🇬🇧📖🔄 = who taught the nation to read again
- 🏠👈 = of our own
This article was originally published by the Daily Sceptic.
