Is our language becoming idiographic again? Communicating with emoticon culture.

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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 😀

Photo by Fausto García on Unsplash

How to write better blog posts

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This will be a somewhat relative post, as all blogs are different. They have different readers and serve different purposes. For blogs like this one though, where you are trying to offer a genuine digital service, along with sound advice, thought provoking stories, and solidarity for like-minded people, making the effort to raise the bar is – I think – a noble pursuit.

I know the title of this post is going to be treated with a healthy amount of scepticism, but considering the amount of nonsense I’ve written, and the many, many mistakes that I’ve made, I feel like I can add a few dots of wisdom to the topic.

I started blogging almost 15 years ago, and at the time it was just a way of interacting with other students at my theology college. My posts tended to be long-winded, poorly written, over detailed, badly structured, filled with reactionary content, and peppered with incendiary commenting.

Since then I’ve made a lot of effort to carefully cultivate a readership, be more specific in my focuses, and generous with my platform. For those of you who have followed me for a long time, I hope you agree that this is a far better blog that It once was.

This post has been prompted by three people who kindly emailed and specifically asked me this question over the last few weeks. I said I would write something on it, so here it is.

There are many ‘how to write better’ posts already out there, so this just contains a few ideas that I personally have had to work hard on. I hope one or two might be useful!

Take it seriously

Readers are people first. My job is to engage with them as human beings and not click numbers.

I have quite a detailed a profile in my mind of a fictional, yet believable person who I’m writing to before I begin to plan each post. This isn’t always the same person but does tend to be one of three or four that I regularly think of. At very least I remember that my reader is not me.

This means that I take great care in how I research a post, how I structure it, the language I choose, its length, and its anecdotes. I try to be person specific.

Also, because I see blogging as a genuine part of my ministry, I invest in it. I pay for a self-hosted WordPress account, domain name, and template, and I take time off in the year to properly design and renovate the site.

Know your USP

‘USP’ or unique selling point, is basically a tool to help you remember what it is that makes you distinct. Your unique voice online should flow out of your unique personality. What place does your voice have in the wider conversation? No blog can be the complete word on any subject, but it can still have a clearly recognisable voice.

YouthWorkHacks tries to be a bridge between theoretical and practical youth work. Its place is to push the boundaries of theory into real application, and to challenge practices to engage more critically with their philosophical roots.

This is why the ‘voice’ of YouthWorkHacks requires pure practitioners to reach deeper for foundations, and pure theorists to reach a wider for applications. Hence the moto: ‘reaching further in youth work.’

As I’m both a practitioner and an academic, this suits me well. Some blogs are more resource driven, and some are more abstract. What’s your USP voice in the conversation – what do you bring that’s distinct?

Critically engage

Postgraduate marking criteria always mentions critical engagement. This is the ability to look at one issue from several angles, including perspectives that you might not agree with. The best posts follow this same principle; softening highly rhetorically or reactionary language in favour of genuine discussion.

When critiquing, the critically engaged post tries to see the context in which something is framed, it looks for the extraneous threads that pull on the central idea, and it knows the best arguments against its own position.

Rather than, ‘Person A said something stupid,’ how about ‘Person A has presented this idea, which is consistent with their other works in “these” ways, but it’s probably based in “X” particular context. Person B has a slightly different approach, which contrasts with Person A in the “following ways”. I think Person B makes the more lucid argument for “these following reasons”, and I would apply that in “these ways”.’ This is longer, but it gives far more content and it outgrows our own opinions.

Provide more than just problems

Plenty of blog posts don’t go beyond an observation of something they don’t like. If you think something is missing, or ethically wrong, or dangerous, then say so, but say why, and say what you think needs to happen in response.

A blog that only focuses on problems tends to be written as an exercise in catharsis. The focus becomes the writer and not what is said. When several blogs do this, they become an echo chamber, rehashing the same problems without solutions, and reframing the same issues without acknowledging hope. A post that says, ‘I saw this and it sucks’ without any more evaluation will always leave me wanting, and will probably mean that I won’t return to that blog again.

I want my blog to be a place of positivity and kindness, but without losing the reality of genuine struggles. It’s entirely possible to do both, but you have to plan, research, reflect, and write with more care and attention that just ‘sticking up a post.’

Blogs can’t square every circle, and they shouldn’t try to fix things that should be grieved over, but they can still provide a unique view, or an abstract set of ‘maybe if’ ideas.

Write better

This is such an obvious thing to say but good content requires a working vehicle to deliver it. When I read a post that clearly hasn’t been proofread, then I feel disrespected as a reader.

You don’t have to be Shakespeare to make sure that you have full stops in the right place, or capital letters for names.

I’m not a naturally gifted writer, instead I have to work very hard at it. This is why I tend to proof read my posts the day after I write them – and obviously before I post them. I also use tools like Grammarly and PaperRater – and I write my posts first into Word, rather than the blog wizard. Personally, I’m terrible at using inconsistent tenses, run-on sentences, and using words like ‘simply’ over repetitively. I use passive voice too much, and I write too much like I talk.

If you are a writer, then you must also be an editor. This is about serving the reader. My wife explains it this way; ‘Tim, you need to take me by the hand and walk me through each point, don’t assume that I’ll just get it.’

Pray more

Pray before you post. Pray for the message, the content, the readers, and for the people those readers work with.

As a ministry, commit it to God in the same way you would anything else.

If what you actually want to do is journal, then journal instead. If, however, you are advertising a public blog and producing content that shapes and informs people’s lives in ministry, then give it that same attention you would if those people were in the room with you.

Pray like you mean it, like you respect it, and like you want it to genuinely serve.

Thanks folks. I hope you found something helpful in there. I don’t always get these right (in fact, some times I get none of these right!) but they’re all well worth the effort and the time.

 

Photo by Patrick Fore on Unsplash

Why we need sync – Grace Wheeler

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As a communicator, one of the things I always used to connect with people is stories.  I tell stories about dogs, about inspiring people, but mostly about me!  This is not because I love myself, it’s because I know me best and when I share something of my life it connects with my audience.

Stories are powerful.

I don’t know about you but I can remember the stories I read as a child, curled up with my mum on the sofa or fighting sleep as I settled down for the night.  And I do so for a very good scientific reason.  When we hear stories, our brain secretes powerful chemicals: cortisol which makes us pay attention, oxytocin (the same hormone that bonds mother and baby), which makes us feel empathy for the story’s characters and dopamine (also found in some ‘fun enhancing’ substances), which makes us feel good when there is a happy ending.  Moreover, brain scans during storytelling reveal that the same chemical patterns are observed in both teller’s and hearer’s brains.  It’s as if you sync your mind to the other person’s using the power of story.  It’s as if Jesus knew what he was doing when he used parables to communicate the deep truths of the cosmos.

And in youth culture stories resonate even more.  When you use Snapchat or Insta these days you are not just invited to capture a moment in time but to tell a story.  Our music videos and computer games have evolved.  The story is central to them.

What does this have to do with evangelism?

Recently I have been captivated by the idea that in evangelism, three stories collide.  We have a story, God has a story and our friend who does not yet know Jesus also has a story.  Great evangelism is about bringing these stories together through the power of relationship.  One of the first steps here is to know your own story.

Purpose, forgiveness, friendship, belonging, change, hope, life, love, adventure, guidance, mission.  All these words help young people tell a story of the difference Jesus makes in their life.  St Peter writes, ‘Always be prepared to give an answer to anyone who asks you to give a reason for the hope that you have.’  1 Peter 3:15. One of the best things we can do for our young people is to prepare them to tell their story.

As an evangelist, I am compelled by the idea that if every Christian young person knew their story, God’s story, was praying for a few mates and committed to intentional relationships with those around them, the viral potential for the Gospel could be unleashed in a new way.  That’s why at Youth for Christ we have created Sync, a Youtube channel to help young people know their story and be inspired to share it.  I would love you to check it out and run it for free with your young people.

 

Grace Wheeler is the National Evangelist at Youth for Christ.  You can explore the free Sync resources here and see the Youtube channel here