Hieroglyphics were (mostly) phonetic. You can do a 1:1 mapping of hieroglyphics to Ancient Greek (with a few exceptions) - Carl Sagan Videos: Cosmic Rosetta Stone - https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xeryd2
It’s both. Each emoji has a pictographic meaning as defined by Unicode, but there’s also a language that has arisen contextually on social media. For example the “painting nails” emoji may refer to painting one’s nails, but it can also mean “whatever” as in “whatever you say I’m just painting my nails”.
Or the skull emoji which has a variety of meanings relating to being metaphorically dead - “I’m dying from laughing”, “you’re fucked”, etc.
There’s also the controversy over the acceptability or not of using the sobbing emoji to represent laughter.
2) Evolution is a biological process term, and an overloaded and ambiguous one at that. Culture is accretive and driven by social dynamics. “Cultural evolution” is literally nonsensical. This was, however, a popular way of thinking in the nineteenth century; make of that what you will.
> Evolution is a biological process term, and an overloaded and ambiguous one at that. Culture is accretive and driven by social dynamics. “Cultural evolution” is literally nonsensical. This was, however, a popular way of thinking in the nineteenth century; make of that what you will.
I think you might be confusing the modern understanding of cultural evolution with the 19th century (to put it plainly: racist) idea of social Darwinism. Cultural evolution is a much more recent concept that makes an analogy between the modern understanding of the transmission of genes and the transmission of ideas. The analogy is of course imperfect, but by no means "literally nonsensical". See here for a very comprehensive discussion: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/evolution-cultural/
OP made a specific claim - words represent an evolutionary progression from hieroglyphs, are therefore better, and we should go forward and not back.
I see nothing in cultural memetic theorizing (which I summarized as “culture is accretive and driven by social dynamics”) that supports that.
The term “cultural evolution” is highly unfortunate as it is one more example of humanities folk borrowing science terminology in a bid to coin some evocative word salad that will sound relevant and scientific.
> 2) Evolution is a biological process term, and an overloaded and ambiguous one at that. Culture is accretive and driven by social dynamics. “Cultural evolution” is literally nonsensical. This was, however, a popular way of thinking in the nineteenth century; make of that what you will.
Calling things racist isn't a valid argument. Meme theory is from the 20th century, not the 19th.
It is not a regression. It is a way of encoding the incredibly nuanced human communication into dry text.
We communicate with much more than language (autistic persons excluded, as they can be blind to social cues) and many messages are open to multiple interpretations. Emojis help frame the context, which would otherwise be framed by inflexion, tone, subtle movements of tens facial muscles.
> Pictographs can convey way more meaning than text. Add in cultural competency (subtext etc.) and it becomes incredibly potent. Hence, memes.
Citation needed. I think you might prove that by expressing those three sentences in pictograms, so that we can verify whether they convey "way more meaning". I have my doubts.
Emoji are entirely ideograms.