Archive for month: July, 2019

I’m currently sat in a little café just outside of Mullsjö in Sweden, trying to send a text message to a local. Try as I might, however, my indoctrinated little British phone just can’t do it! The message icon keeps flashing up with a little “!”. Clearly this means ‘something is wrong, and this hasn’t worked’. When I click that icon, another pops up, an unfinished circle with an arrowhead which clearly tells me, ‘click here to retry.’

It strikes me that this must part of my phone’s latest update, because when this happened to me last year in Norway (name dropping the Nordic countries!), it said ‘message failed’, rather than “!” and ‘retry to send’, rather than the little circle arrow.

I know instinctively, however, what these little phone icons mean. They appear everywhere in my everyday digital world. Sometimes, when cooking I look for that same ‘retry’ button in real life… usually shortly after realising my stove doesn’t have an ‘undo’ button.

In a Western world of emoticons, glyphs, and symbols, icons are becoming a far more regular part of everyday life.

It’s not like we didn’t use symbols before. The well-dressed silhouetted people on doors tell us where to pee, and £, € and $ signs tell us that we’re about to spend money. These, however, represent top-down imposed and generationally broad ideas that have been widely used for quite a while. This new generation of icons which we communicate with, however, are growing right out of the beating heart of youth culture – driven by the consumer habits of the populous. Vox populi vox dei!

A youth language revolution

Is it possible that our young people are actually shaping the biggest change in our language since the beginning of the last century?

It’s as if young people (by whom I’m talking about late millennials and the digital natives of Gen Z) are leading a somewhat natural evolution of language right before our very eyes.

Idiographic vs. alphabetic languages

When I lived in London I decided to try and learn ancient Assyrian. Why? Kicks and giggles, I guess. Needless to say, I didn’t get very far.

Assyrians used a system called cuneiform to write words. Cuneiform is a nifty system of pressing wedge-shaped lines into soft clay before it hardens. In the earliest forms of cuneiform, the lines actually made recognisable pictures to represent a clear idea of what was happening. So, a picture of a face could mean ‘speak’ or ‘eat’. A picture of fire could mean ‘hot’ or ‘cook’. The picture gave you an idea to interpret into meaning, which is what’s known as idiographic language. Eventually these pictures became simpler, and finally just the most basic outlines of the picture remained as the beginnings of an alphabet. Basically, what they had were emoticons; ideas that – correctly interpreted in context – conveyed meaning.

What cuneiform and other idiographic languages did was to create simple ways of recording and communicating. In contrast, our later alphabetic languages are far more complex and can groan under the weight of their own convolutions. In ideographic languages, not a lot of detail or embellishment was given or was even needed. It would just have taken too long as the clay would have dried out before we got through a sentence!

Because of the simplicity, context was always really important and without knowing the people who were writing, it would have been easy to misunderstand what was being said. You needed a greater personal connection between the reader and the writer, and the readers had to be interpreters first.

Sound familiar?

The rise of the emoticon from youth culture

Last week Archbishop Justin Welby tweeted the entire Lord’s Prayer using nothing but emoticons. Hacker Noon wrote a post on exactly how to communicate using nothing but emoticons, and Psychologist World recently published on the emotional benefits of communicating with emoticons.

Icon-driven, or idiographic language is freshly becoming part of our everyday communication again, and this neat change is being driven by the chief digital consumer: young people.

Almost all of our work with young people relies on communication. From advertising events, forming communities, establishing order, sharing Jesus through the Bible, talks, videos and creativity. Communication is at the core of what we do.

Communication that assumes interpretation

I wouldn’t suggest for one moment that we switch to an emoticon-driven language, but I’d implore us to be more aware of the internal processes of young people when receiving our communications.

Young people are not just being lazy or simplicitic; there are layers of interpretation going on in how they communicate through icons. Just like an hour glass, large ideas are being funnelled thorough deceptively simple iconography, then opened out again though individual processing.

This makes young people incredibly interpretive of ideas that come out from communication – more so than in other recent generations. It would be a mistake, therefore, to assume that simplified methods of communication – such as emoticons or icons – means simplified translation, reception, or interpretation of language.

Interpretation of a simple idea to a complex one is now native to our young people’s everyday language. This means it’s potentially easier for them to misunderstand because most of our communication goes the other way: We translate complex ideas into simplified ones.

Much of our teaching is making Gospel stories and big ideas digestible, but the simplified end point might then be read, deconstructed, then reconstructed by a young person naturally and immediately into something totally different, leaving us confused: But we were so clear and simple – how did they get that out of what I said?

Starting to move with the evolution of language

When you read a list of emoticons, you have to understand the person speaking, the context it applies to, and then make some quick interpretive choices as to what’s being said. Young people do that at an alarmingly natural pace. It’s as if their brains are actually changing shape around their everyday language habits. If we keep on communicating without this awareness we are going to be left behind.

There are sometimes, therefore, when we will need to say what we mean without embellishment, metaphor, or story. We might need to be let our teaching and discussions to become much more complex, allowing for the interaction of more complex themes.

There are other times where we’re better probably communicating through questions, rather than just making propositional teaching points. We also shouldn’t assume that our classic talk structures – including three stories, two metaphors, one video, and two application points – will necessarily connect into one big idea for the young people without an overtly clear lead for that.

I think this also gives us amazing new opportunities to have much more complex conversations after the initial round of communication. Now that young people are more naturally making interpretative links, we can have longer and deeper discussions as an overflow of their own immediate internal cognitive processing of language. Internal critical thinking may be the surprising but very welcome manifestation of this change.

Finally, adding the pictorial element to modern language engages different parts of many young people’s brains than traditional prose might do on its own. This could create easier ways to be creative with young people, and should provide for much more effective ways of moving head knowledge to heart knowledge.

Language really is everything. Side-line it at our peril, yet exploring its evolutions with our young people can yield amazing fruit.

I’d love to hear about how you are engaging the natural, daily heart languages of young people to share the message of Jesus with them. Comment, or drop me a line! Thanks 😀