Saturday, June 4, 2011

When Emoticons Just Aren't Enough

The internet age is one marked by misunderstandings in the realm of communication. Indeed, though man has split the atom, gone to the moon and made Anime available to every human on the face of the planet,  it has also become easier for simple comments like "Nice work" to lead to the personal equivalent of World War Three (did Ham radio users ever suffer from this? There's a thesis paper in there somewhere) . To avert relational Armageddon, clever people came up with "emoticons". Initially simple ascii text symbols such as the 'smiley face' shown here, : ) and the enigmatic nerd in the toupee who thinks he's cool but is actually clueless ?8^), these eventually developed into graphic symbols such as these:

I'm sorry, but this doesn't tell me anything

We are anything but a static society, and things that may have worked in the past have become obsolete, the way toaster ovens were replaced by things like i-phones (I guess- I'm not very tech savvy). It should also be kept in mind that we are as a society getting "stupider" by the minute, and less capable of interpreting the subtleties of emoticons. I therefore propose switching to Imagicons™, a new and more expressive form of communications where tiny images at the ends of sentences are replaced with large pictures at the end of paragraphs.

This one says, 'I KNEW I should have shot that guy'

I have included an extended example below. I heard today that someone named Dionne Brand won $75k for some poems at a competition. Being a fan of old skool poetry I took a look at some of her work. See if you can guess how I felt about her 'work' by looking at my Imagicons™:

'Thirsty'
This city is beauty
unbreakable and amorous as eyelids,
in the streets, pressed with fierce departures,
submerged landings,
I am innocent as thresholds
and smashed night birds, lovesick,
as empty elevators

let me declare doorways,
corners, pursuit, let me say
standing here in eyelashes, in
invisible breasts, in the shrinking lake
in the tiny shops of untrue recollections,
the brittle, gnawed life we live,
I am held, and held

why, the touch of everything blushes me,
pigeons and wrecked boys,
half dead hours, blind musicians,
inconclusive women in bruised dresses
even the habitual gray-suited men with terrible
briefcases, how come, how come
I anticipate nothing as intimate as history

would I have had a different life
failing this embrace with broken things,
iridescent veins, ecstatic bullets, small cracks
in the brain, would I know these particular facts,
how a phrase scars a cheek, how water
dries love out, this, a thought as casual
as any second eviscerates a breath

and this, we meet in careless intervals,
in coffee bars, gas stations, in prosthetic
conversations, lotteries, untranslatable
mouths, in versions of what we may be,
a tremor of the hand in the realization
of endings, a glancing blow of tears
on skin, the keen dismissal in speed

 See? It works great!

-Mandrake

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