From cave drawings to emojis: Communication comes full circle | Marcel Danesi | TEDxToronto

I'm going to start off with a cliche I'm an academic and we're full of them I guess I am I'm going to say that we are always evolving huh the important thing for me as a Samia Titian is to determine how we're evolving where do I find evidence for the evolution and how what does it mean to us today why because the things that we produce with our brain words symbols and signs tell us what's in the brain are we changing or are we ever is there any evidence for this you know the semiotician will look for small scale experiences of the larger scale thing is there any one sign today that indicates how we are changing yeah take a look at it that's the face with tears of joy that was chosen in 2015 by the Oxford English Dictionary as the word of the year word it's hardly a word it's a picture I guess it is a kind of word the word emoji means picture word not only but the oxford dictionary on its website said we chose it because that's where things are going Wow so the Oxford Dictionary is a semiotic s-- dictionary it looks for a change in words and signs and in symbols now if it stops there you'll say well so what what we really have to start at the beginning how did we come about to do something like this where it doesn't grow on trees it must have come from some historical source so let's go to the beginning this occurred 17300 years ago it's amazing in fact anthropologists call the first types of paintings this is in Losco France paintings or inscriptions or sculptures of any kind is the great leap forward from living basically on instincts to thinking we became a smart species that shows look at how marvelous that is how do you understand what do you get from this you can't read it you look at it and you extract feeling from it marvellous just look at that that's absolutely amazing how much feeling you can get from and it was done seventeen thousand three hundred years ago now let's jump forward to the present century you may say oh sure of course it really is the same kind of instinct abstract art expressionist mmm-hmm it's a child all you have to do is put paper in front of a child not a cave wall maybe if you do have a cave wall let me write on it paper give them a pencil or a crayon and instinctively instinctively they start to do something like that nobody has done it in fact they're so proud of it because it's a magic in the brain it's images that are there that need to come out they come out through the hands and they express what they see it's almost like a dream world coming to life nobody has ever taught them this okay so so far so good images are the way we create sense and meaning and represent the world now look at this the images are still there this is of course hieroglyphic writing but look at the difference here there's an enormous difference here there are still images but now you don't get a whole sense out of it like you got from that cave drawing or the child's drawing you have to read these in a sequence starting from I a spot presumably the left and go around it so you're not any more feeling or sensing you're thinking you're reading and in order to make any meaning from it you have to go through it all and then at the end step back and say what did it mean what a change in the brain honestly this occurred well 5,000 years ago for the first time ever in the history of humanity we wrote our thoughts so that we could literally see our thoughts before us writing is an incredible accomplishment you won't have history without writing there's no such thing as history without writing you can recount events orally but history actually records them in order in a sequence now what happened after that well here we are all of a sudden in the ancient marketplaces of of you know the Middle East and elsewhere in the world instead of using pictures which are you know it's complicated to write them to inscribe them let's use symbols for sounds yeah just like digits instead of using a lot of like the Roman numeral system use a couple of symbols to represent all possible numbers same thing here what twenty-four twenty-five twenty-six of them will do to make absolutely any word you need however there's still vision in that we're not our eyes are not trained to see what they were originally let me take the letter A the letter A starts as a pictograph in Egypt it's the Aleph the ox when it gets to Sinai you can see that they removed some of the details of the ox when the Phoenicians came about they say okay all we need to do is represent it in this form and just pronounce the first letter for the ox and then when you get to the Greeks you get to that right and now the Ox is back on its horns as an amazing that E has a long pictorial history behind it now when you have that a and other letters now you can kind of ignore the picture writing you can start writing thoughts and you can when you write the word you can actually hear the sounds other words that's a different way that's a different brain now here's what must have happened we now have writing and the brain kind of splits into two parts there's the part that is used now to reading and thinking and the other part is still involved in pictures and feeling and incense and what happens is this split brain creates an enormous experiment in humanity in fact that left side of the brain which has writing and needs to be trained to do it develops things like philosophy science mathematics prose and the other side which is still there but separated from that one draws creates art music in fact this is the greatest experiment ever in the history of humanity in fact the separation of thinking from feeling is the reason why we have great artworks because the artists now are separated to go ahead and indulge in it and the other one are the thinkers now are they ever reunited oh yeah but we still to this day think that well the arts are over here right and science and math are over here we give this a little more value I know about you but when I was in school music well you can do that after school I in school you got to do right the important things huh there is value to asserts or certain signs that we produce because they involve thinking rather than feeling but what an experiment now by the Renaissance the beginning of the modern world the two come together again isn't it marvelous that's perspective drawing look at it three dimensions in to our eye is completely Deut I did it happen well you have to be an artist but you also have to be a geometry in other words the brain is always trying to reconnect when it doesn't connect you know the world a disconnected brain and we've had it for a long time has also disadvantages it produces mental diseases I mean dyslexia does not occur in a society where there's no alphabets but those images what an experiment really and in fact one of the great scholars at this university and Marshall McLuhan called it the age of print it's an age where images and feeling have to be separated indulged in but the real heavy burden of thinking is in print in in writing in phonetic alphabets I'll guess what the brain doesn't want to be separated for very long so enter the 20th century what happened in the 20th century what started the process to reintegrating the brain but it started with the artists among them for example the futurists look at this isn't this amazing where's the meaning where's the writing where's the images well you figure it out right in a sense you're getting understanding and feeling almost at once now these are artists this is called futurism not the future this is how we're going to be reading and communicating soon and this occurred at the beginning of the 20th century interesting because at about the same time society itself and institutions within society started to get the idea among these our advertisers why is advertising so persuasive it's because they created the ad the ad has the image and the text that's why we buy things they persuade us our brain is integrated senses it as a whole and says yeah I kind of need those shoes or whatever it is advertising even if they're even if I don't need them because it's telling us a message with an integrated brain now who else knew this popular culture comic books a new integrated language where this is a early 1940's manga I know about you but I used to love super and comics as a kid why cuz I could see and then read the thoughts seeing and reading that's a language that's a new way of processing information of understanding the world of feeling it playing with it in fact comic-book language at first was considered to be kids language although the funnies when it first started in the form of cartoons they were called funnies they were in newspapers I guess newspapers wanted to sprinkle a little humor a little game playing into their so-called serious other pages so this came about our eyes and our brains got used to this kind of language in some cases we even transferred it to and use to the screen our new cave wall remember the Batman series on television I thought it was the stupidest thing around they looked like men in tights and there was ping BAM Wow and you'd get it on top there that's a perfect example of a language that is both visual and textual right there okay so where are we going from here what happened well you know it's a small step forward to the emoji could not have introduced the emoji before that moji started becoming really popular throughout the world as a form of universal communication figuring that images no thought pictures are worth a thousand words are more universal so that people with different orthographies and different systems of writing could communicate could find a common ground of communication well that common ground was already laid in the ancient world when nobody has to tell you how to interpret how to feel that marvelous cave wall painting really you don't that's in US you have learn the other part the print thinking is an achievement in every generation feeling an art is not it's the default it's interesting because what happened not too long ago five six years ago they decided well you know what this would be good to integrate to bring it together and we have a new alphabet yeah that's the new alphabet and it's an alphabet it's not random and answers it's not you know casual alphabet you have to know how to use these you have to know where to put them in your message and let me tell you I I'm seven years old okay I don't use those things but I do communicate with some of my students especially the members of my band we play for charity look us up that's a plug if I get a message from one of my Sameer tones and it doesn't end or have any of these you know what my next reaction is I'll write right back are you okay something wrong I got used to it I understand that we need feeling that when I'm communicating informally and maybe not so informally anymore that I need to sense as well as think I you also get essays from my students now and in the arm you know the title page they will put the their name the title and then they'll put a smiley do they want a good mark probably imagine me back in the mid 1960s handing in a paper with a cartoon on it I may have gotten expelled what a change world see what I'm getting at it has changed these these are really signs of change you know I like them I really really do in fact the they're everywhere now they we're not going to we're not going to step back in time this crystal Queen don't finish um I I don't know how to stop it here sorry I'm speaking Italian when I can't think in English mm-hmm um we have a new cave wall it's called the screen you know you've seen the movie The Matrix right Matrix is the screen we now live on that a lot and that has this new language and it's very visual and textual just think of Facebook Instagram Twitter snapchat I missed any YouTube and memes memes are new ways of disseminating information disseminating what I would call graffiti in cyberspace we love those things because they kind of enlightened the day we're back in a kind of a tribal village where we wrote on walls and we left messages behind love messages you know I examine texts of my students I'm not kidding you they gave me their text gladly even if it was a romantic text I could never imagine handing in as research to my professor one of my love letters to my wife I'm not caring about it boy has the world ever changed its you and I'm getting that a simple emoji tells us so much about who we are today how our brain is processing information how it's taking it in and so I'm going to end I'm going to conclude in the past if I was giving a lecture like this you know how an academic would conclude a quotation from Friedrich Nietzsche or from Hegel that nobody has ever read but ports anyhow well I'm not going to do that I'm going to end in a contemporary where I'm going to say goodbye like this thank you [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 41,382

Rating: 4.9374113 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Canada, Education, Communication

Id: 0_QylCztffk

Length: 17min 51sec (1071 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 13 2016