The notion that” the medium is the message“, as McLuhan said, has never been more present than in our use of interfaces . In order to make possible to have digital conversations, from the dark patterns design to the accessibility needs, today technologies have all in common manipulation of signs, symbols, icons. As we us more technology to communicate with others, we became ourselves instruments of communication.
Icons, the images that organize elements in different surfaces like physical objects, like a remote control, or the flat screens of monitors and cellphones seems to appear have primacy over word of text. Symbols like triangles, circles and squares today go far beyond specialized use like video game controllers.
How much of a web page is text, and how much is about images, I found this encouraging blog post, arguing that 95% of the total web content is about text, or typography. The post goes further linking to another blog where is made the following distinction:design still about word ( or language).
Besides the fact that sound overcomes image when it is used as a description, the kuleshov effect , text, image and sound are semiotic elements that are interchangeable to some extent. The limit is precisely the syntax scope one can spread over the medium. Take sound and it possible manipulations reduced to human language specificity beyond vocalization: words. Take image without words. And take text as image itself, or text as interface.
All these factor come into comparison when analyzing digital content. Still, a problem is that each channel as been taken as separate and only now some research shows that auditory perception is influenced by image.
Around 70 thousand years ago, say archaeologists, systems of pattern recording were produced intending to engrave lines beyond the mere accident of contact friction.
So with this gap of 40, 50 thousand years,one of the two scenarios maybe happened: the first is one where a proto-language emerged from these images, one that had lexical properties such the formation of words. The second is carried out by some linguists of the Noam Chomsky tradition, that argues the language is a feature that emerged as a whole, without a proto-language.
In recent years, there is a hype about how technology is showing images from thoughts:
Meaning, the holy grail of language, is one thing that images, sound and word cannot bear it alone, or separated by channels of significance. The emergence of graphical interfaces is so pervasive that text today is resembling the interface itself. More we dive into images, more we find words, names, moods, variations of shape and content: the syntax behind it
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