Language and Communication

Something I found myself wondering the other night, was about how communication might have began.  The word language and the very idea of it tend to lead us to thoughts about words, grammar, various languages and word origins.  The idea of communication isn't limited to language, and language isn't even limited to the concept of spoken or written communication; think of body language as a concept.

We can easily lead ourselves into thinking about hieroglyphics as a written language, giving a "word value" to an image, especially because it makes it easier to approach the task.  This can be a limiting way of thinking about it though, because structures of written and spoken language are not inherently structures of picto-graphic writing.  As we use spoken and "written" language to convey ideas and concepts complexly, hieroglyphs are their own way of conveying ideas and concepts through structured imagery of sorts.   Our words, characters, glyphs, sounds- all are tools we use to let someone else know what we know, or what we think.  Language is a means to an end, the end being communicating.  This helped me be able to better explain and understand my... let's call it interest, in how the Internet has affected language.

There was a while were I was one of those that "resented to decay of language and social interaction" that the Internet seemed to encourage, with posts of terrible spelling and grammar, memes, posts about what you're doing(except that what you're doing is posting), it goes on.  I didn't stay off the Internet though, and found things that I appreciate about it, like being able to wish a friend across the world a happy birthday, whom you haven't seen in years or have phone access to.  Another thing I've come to appreciate is memes.

Yep. Memes.  Oh and gifs.  As humans have had more time to develop this new "social landscape", as I have previously called it, we've created a lot of new and different ways to communicate not only to each other, but to communicate ideas in whole new ways.  I sometimes get lost watching a gif cycle endlessly, and many can strongly convey a thought or feeling.  Sometimes there are words, and as most should know(this blog is on the Internet), memes are still gifs with words.  That's right, I called a picture a "still gif".  That's legit, right?

Memes and gifs go a long way in communication, which is interesting to me because I resented them at first.  "Oh look, yet another meme about an arrow to the knee."  It got old, then I got used to it, and now memes are kind of a thing that just is, an Internet thing.

For better or worse, the Internet has a global ramifications on human kind(and I'm aware most of the world doesn't have computers), and I feel it would be silly not to complexly think about the role the Internet is playing and will play in human social progression.

Trot On Everypony,
Alturiigo

p.s. here are some memes and I Tumblr shot I had lying around