Tweets and emojis are seeping into and changing our fiction like microplastics swirling in your baby’s bloodstream for a future condition we haven’t yet diagnosed. Happy Wednesday. (Ferrante and Knausgaard analysis in here for those inclined to skip anything with the word “emoji” in the headline.)
…who could contest the idea that communications, behind a ceaseless inflow of data, have been continually evolving to target ever more primitive brain functions? Think of the obscurely nauseous casino ping of tugging downward on Instagram and seeing it refresh with a notification, the instant dopamine rush. The scroll and the ideogram died out because of their simplicity, only to have been revived for that reason. The scroll is a frictionless waterfall on the screen. And while an entire alphabet of ideograms would be unusably bulky, a handful of key ones, scattered into our language, condense thousands of complicated reactions into a few dozen universal symbols.
