Back to hieroglyphics
I love the fact that Israeli companies are in the front of innovation and high tech and my first intention is to support development made in Israel. However, and as bad as I feel, I cannot avoid writing that Zlango is a service that nobody need.
If it wasn’t bad enough when young people’s language and ability to write properly is ruined by shortcuts and emoticons Zlango suggest to degrade our written language and eloquence to the level of cave man . Michael Arrington is right when he write :
At first glance this is nothing more than a nifty piece of mobile software and a way to send icon based messages over inexpensive and ubiquitous SMS networks.
But I think the cultural implications of Zlango may be much deeper.
(although he meant to compliment Zlango)
And the real scary part is that Zlango and its hieroglyphics will become a success story.
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Rogel @ June 28, 2006
I think you are right - but I am also sure that it is not possible that we can create sentences with a complex structure. We would need more icons to do that - and than we are near the chinese language with over 50.000 symbols. So I think it will be a success for short messages but it will be more and more mixed with the “normal” language which you can do on Zlango. When you look at chat software like MSN or ICQ - we are always using small “caveman” symbols to talk to each other - because it is faster to type and some of us that use this services are living in a fast world. But I fully agree on your post that it isn’t helpful for kids education and for those who even know their own language correctly. On the plus side - people that life in different countries can talk to each other when they learn that “caveman” symbols.
When the level of conversation is reduce to growls living in different country isn’t an issue any more. That, however, doesn’t change the fact that the level of conversation is reduced to growls:)
My fear is not that we will develop 50,000 icons, but that we will use only few. What we are going to have is an inarticulate culture, and I can’t think of any reason why is this considered as progress
with emoticons being part of the cyberworld. ITs only only rational that icon based SMS is a wonderful idea. The XGen will figure it out, as long as the tool set is avialable (read as hammer and chisel here !!) :)-
I have very little problem with emoticons when they are added to text. The issue here is the replacement of modern text with less unsophisticated method.
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