Musings of a 7th Grader Playing on Her Cellphone

   

In the early 1800’s, before telephones ☎️ were invented, there was the telegram 📠. The telegraph was a machine that sent messages to other people over wires using electric currents.  Morse code, a sequence of sounds 🔈 or lights 🔆 which correspond with letters in the alphabet 🔤, was a popular way to send telegrams.  It was the beginning of using technology to communicate without spoken or written words.  There wasn’t much personality in these messages I would guess.  Just a bunch of dots and dashes 💱, used to send messages long distances.  But the telegram was an important technology that helped people communicate in earlier days 👍, way before the Internet, cellphones 📱, and email 📩.

http://davies-linguistics.byu.edu/elang495/samples/lexical_topic.asp

     This past weekend I spent a lot of time in the car 🚘, driving around Oregon and Washington going to tournaments 🏀 and concerts 🎻.  Usually when I’m in the car, I’m pretty productive.  I bring along lots of homework and always have something to read for one class or another 📚.  When I’m bored of that, I usually do what most pre-teen girls like myself do these days, I grab my phone and check out my text messages 💬, check social media sites, or just play an addictive app.

     I have one post on my Instagram account.  I usually don't post anything, but I added the picture after our vacation to the beach during the holidays 🎉.   It was a perfect picture capturing the moment.  It was a picture of me, with my back to the camera 📷, on a beautiful sandy beach in the middle of the Pacific Ocean 🌊.  Because it had just rained earlier, I was standing under a majestic rainbow  🌈 floating over the ocean with a clear sunny sky in the background.  Anyways, I posted the picture to my Instagram account, and slowly the 'Likes ❤️ from my ‘Followers’ 👥 started coming in.  Some of my friends posted short comments, but I noticed after awhile that most of the comments weren't sentences or even words, but simply little pictures, or better known as emojis ☺️.

     Some older people still use emoticons, like ;-) which means I’m winking at you.  But why use three keystrokes, when you can send one of a million different emojis that express how you feel.  Here are some of the emojis people used on my post: 😍, which means they are looking at something that is cute or pretty; 👍, which is a classic sign for yes or approval; 😘, which means someone is giving you a kiss because they like you; and ❤️, which just means I like this a lot.  This was especially cool, because it meant that the people I knew liked my photo and thought it was nice as well.

http://bgr.com/2015/02/06/sms-vs-mms-emoji-costs/

     When playing a musical instrument 🎵, each musician develops their own style, their own interpretation of a piece using intonation and emotion.  If you listen over and over to a piece of music, you might be able to tell who was playing based on their style without looking 🙈.  This was also similar for telegraph operators.  Even though it was someone just pushing electrical dots and dashes into a small machine, they said you could sometimes tell who was writing the telegraph based on that person’s own unique manner of communicating, like did they type fast or slow, or use long-winded sentences or short simple ones.  In the movie Imitation Game, Alan Turing is a genius mathematician ✖️➕➖➗ who was selected by the British to help solve and crack messages the Nazi’s were sending using a machine called Enigma.  The Nazi code changed everyday.  Turing created a machine that could crack the setting of Enigma.  After months of trying without any luck, he figured out that some people always type with a certain pattern, or their own personality 🔓.  This clue helped him to calibrate the machine in a way that could decode the words, solve Enigma and help win the war.

     Today technology lets us use emojis as a form of nonverbal communication.  Emojis allow people to express their feelings without the need for words or to strengthen their statements with an illustrative symbol 💪.  It's modern day hieroglyphics, a new creative language.  It's a universal language that anyone in the world can understand.  How happy am I 😄?  How happy am I now 😃?  How awesomely happy am I now 😝?

     Nonverbal communication is prevalent in everybody’s life.  Your body language can reveal how you feel; your tone of voice can show enthusiasm or sarcasm 😜; your posture; your outfit 👗; the color of your lipstick 💄; your eye contact 👀.  Some people would say that emojis can explain things even better than words could ever describe.  While it was harder to show your personality through a telegram in the 1800's, emojis today make it easier than ever to show your true emotions.  Maybe an emoji really is worth a thousand words 👌.

Sources:

Telegraphy. Wikipedia, n.d. Web.
"Morse Code." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, n.d. Web. 11 Feb. 2015.

Other Sites:

http://www.iemoji.com
http://www.smosh.com/smosh-pit/photos/most-creative-uses-emojis