Icon not find it! : What goes around comes back around

Thousands and thousand of years ago people used pictures to represent words and ideas. This is why  Chinese is such a bastard to learn. There are literally hundreds of thousands of pictures. Ancient Egypt improved on the picture system, cutting down the number of symbioses to a mere two thousand.  Egypt's neighbors were like, yeah this is cool! And we can function with even fewer symbols.

Then Egypt's neighbor's neighbors were like, "Yo, neighbors. We can get this down to twenty-six letters that can be combined to make words which can represent ideas and shit."

And that was the year the word was big news-- you know,  as cool a concept as the Ipad. Speaking of the Ipad, around the time it was revealed and the smart phone became the thing, symbols started reappearing everywhere.

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My account began to look like this

But it had words which were boring after two thousand years. It was time for the internet to reinvent a symbol language.

At first there were only a few icons. People liked them. It was easier than reading so the website people, computer, tablet designers, and smart phone makers decided "the world needs more icons!" This is a prime example of the bandwagon effect.

So all across the world, everybody was all aboard on the icon effect. The more icons the merrier. Sure, the same icon on one site didn't/doesn't exactly take you to the same content on another, but hey icon not find.

And so today's language is changing, not only in the traditional sense of adding new slang, new words (muggle anyone) but also with icons and emoticons. If you live abroad (ahem, South Korea) you might even find yourself wondering what do all these butt faces mean?

Find a kid and ask. And when you find yourself in icon not find it hell, have a virtual beer on me.

Cheers!