Modern Hieroglyphs

All text are images to some degree. You are able to make sense of what I am typing because you have been trained to decipher groups of images pulled from the 26 available in the English alphabet and combined to form words. Civilizations like the ancient Egyptians though used images that were more literally ‘pictures’ of what they intended to convey.

Those images are called hieroglyphs. In a recent post on his blog Joe Schurman, Founder and CEO of Evangelyze Communications and author of Microsoft Voice and Unified Communications, ponders whether future civilizations will look back on our time and consider emoticons to be the hieroglyps of our age. Interesting concept to ponder. Would you say that emoticons are an evolution of our ability to communicate efficiently, or a regression in our ability to communicate by using a questionably literate form of shorthand?