The four previous chapters in this second part of the book have been concerned with some of the most common uses to which writing is put. In each chapter, I have drawn attention to the ways in which material developments in writing technology interact with changing political, economic and social conditions to generate new kinds of practices and new texts. This chapter reflects on the recent changes in written communication associated with digital technology using some of the perspectives developed earlier. When we consider digital communication, there is plenty of evidence that writing is in ascendency, and that there is increased diversification in what we write and how we write it. New questions about who finds a voice and how we evaluate what is written have arisen. At the same time, not everyone can write,¹ and digital exclusion (and refusal) exist even in the most affluent economic contexts. In times of post-truth, populism, political and religious extremism, writing can still be dangerous – but then again, it can also work to unite and consolidate, as it has done in the recent pandemic. If writing plays such a significant role in our social and cultural life, using it wisely is crucially important.

New technologies for writing take a wide range of forms and many of us own or have access to a number of devices, including desktop computers, laptops, e-readers, tablets and smartphones. All these are technologies of the screen, and to use the terminology introduced in Chapter 3, the screen has become the dominant kind of display. And nearly all screen displays are controlled by keyboards of some kind or another. They are often used in combination with a trackpad or mouse. Alternatively, the keyboard may be virtual as it is in most smartphones. Peripheral devices like printers and scanners, and various kinds of data storage technology also play a part, too. In sum, we might say that there are now more varied ways of making a mark, and more choices available in when and where to view writing, particularly when we consider that most of us still use some older writing technologies alongside the new. Much of the time then, we use a range of technologies for writing on a day-to-day basis, and what’s more, we move fluently between them.

The appearance of writing is changing in other ways, too. Writing literally looks different when it so regularly appears in close combination with other media – this means that a multimodal semiotic perspective is important when analyzing digital communication, and also, on a more practical level, it means there are more complex design choices to be made, as well as new considerations about genres, conventions and what is deemed to be appropriate. And on the fringes of what we might define as writing, there is a range of common abbreviations, emojis and gifs that are used to supplement the interactive work of writing, bringing a sort of playfulness and subtle subversion into play. This chapter begins by looking at digital technology through the descriptive framework that was developed in the first part of this book. Using the idea of the double technology of writing – in other words distinguishing between the technology for writing and the technology of writing can help us to tease apart some of the distinctive features of using digital technology for writing. I want to look at the future of writing, but this necessitates having a closer look at contemporary practices, to identify trends and possibilities as well as examining what I refer to as the changing topology of communication.

9.1 A New Technology for Writing

The unifying feature of everything that could be described as digital writing is that it is a visual configuration of electronic data, stored as bytes of information and displayed on a screen or monitor. This is a relatively new technology for writing – writing that is screen-based. The rise of screen-based writing has taken place over the last thirty to forty years, and in many different communicative practices, there has been a gradual move from page to screen. Understanding the technology itself as well as the implications of this shift from page to screen is fundamental to the study of digital literacy. Screens are ubiquitous. They vary considerably in size – from the 35 mm square of the smallest smartwatch to the latest generation of giant monitors – some of these being over a metre wide. And, of course, a digital text can be displayed on a large billboard-sized video screen, too. But for most practical purposes screen sizes fall within a narrower range. It is important to note first though that the process of displaying something that is stored as bytes of digital information introduces a significant and new dimension in the writing process: a hidden coding language intervenes between the physical act of pressing keys and the material display of text.

Consider the following question: if our monitor breaks, if we turn it off, or if, as an experiment, we decide to type in a white font on a white background, are we still writing? The straightforward answer is, of course, yes. Yes, because when the monitor is restored or the font is changed back to black on a white background, we realize that we have been writing all along – we just haven’t been able to see it. We were still tapping on the keyboard, still physically involved. Such experiments begin to gnaw away at a fundamental idea running through this book, that writing is essentially a visible language. If we took the broken monitor example to its extreme, then we would be left with writing as a sort of mark-making in the dark – we would, in other words, be tempted to reduce writing to a physical or mechanical action. To counter this, we need to re-assert that any authentic writing practice needs a reader. If writing is primarily a social practice, it needs to be seen. And more than this – any sustained act of writing composition also requires us to be able to read back what we’ve written. In these ways, writing and reading must be seen as inextricably woven together, and a screen display as an essential component of digital writing.

The experiments described above serve to illustrate the significant way in which new technologies recast the process of writing. In the older writing technologies described in this book, the link between what I have called the mark-making principle and the display principle is direct – the Cuneiform script on the clay tablet being the direct result of the impression of a stylus; the characters on a silk scroll the direct result of brush strokes. Here, the logic of mark-making is that of formation – letters or characters are formed by the movement of the hand. On a keyboard, the logic of mark-making is that of selection – letters or characters are chosen from those presented. There is another difference, too: in digital writing, a hidden process intervenes. The pressure on the keyboard or touchscreen turns those symbols into bytes, and renders those bytes as a visual display, faster than you can blink. Without getting bogged down in too much detail, we can say that those bytes are a stream of electrical signals described in terms of a binary code.

Originally, digital writing made use of an efficient system of translating those bytes into letter symbols based on a system referred to as ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange). Efficient, that is, for representing English letters, numerals and commonly used symbols. But at this point, the politics of language raises its head once again. ASCII failed to take non-Western and non-alphabetic writing systems into account. English dominated the earliest examples of digital writing, and that lasted until the development of Unicode. Unicode is a more expansive system – one that includes Arabic, Cyrillic, Greek and character-based scripts alongside the original ASCII symbol set. There’s a significant time-lag though, particularly if one considers that the first Amstrad PCs were on sale in the mid-1980s, ten years before Unicode was up and running. And because of the thousands of symbols in the character-based writing systems of the Sinosphere, Unicode is still being expanded – individual characters have to be vetted by a specialist international committee.² This is a vivid contemporary example of how writing technologies can exert or reinforce linguistic power.

There are currently over 15,000 items in Unicode and 161 modern and historical scripts. The significance of Unicode should not be underestimated, since it is the process through which all these languages and symbols can be displayed on any computer. Unicode is normally hidden from us, it is part of what happens in that imperceptible gap between a keystroke and the appearance of a letter on the screen. Although the interruption or gap that is inserted between mark-making and display may seem like a trivial matter or perhaps unnecessarily technical detail, it is the key to understanding some very particular features of digital writing. Firstly, display is separated from storage, and this means that not only can the same text be read on the screens of different devices but it also means that many different texts can be read on one single device. This introduces an element of flexibility unknown to earlier technologies. It also makes it possible to create smooth connections between texts, in ways that form the basis of hyperlinking and tagging (see below). Secondly, the fact that the text itself is digital, means that it can be ‘sent’ in compressed form to someone else, who can usually read it back in full. This opens the way for new forms of distribution – distribution in which the original textual object is simply shared. Contrast this with the idea of transporting a single manuscript book, weighing around 30 kg, by horseback, over the muddy terrain and unmade roads of Medieval Europe and you get a sense of why some people talk about a digital revolution.

The separation of display from storage and the resultant gains in the speed and ease of portability and distribution are highly significant and provide the foundations for changing writing practices. Admittedly, viewing the writing depends on the reader having access to compatible technology, and distribution is dependent on digital information moving between the writer and the reader – either through a portable storage device like a memory stick or over the Internet. When digital writing combines with Internet connectivity new possibilities arise. Of course, connectivity and the devices involved in the digital writing process are not freely available. Again, we meet the politics of language head-on – not everybody, even in the most affluent countries of the world, has full access to the new tools of communication. Availability and access are economically determined and what’s more, in some locations, the necessary infrastructure is still underdeveloped.

Building on this understanding, we can now see that the digital mediation of writing is at its most transformative when it combines with connectivity. At this point, instant and interactive communication – online chat and text message exchange become possible. Text exchanges are now so common place, and often so banal, that we can easily overlook their significance. Although the nature of writing means that it has always been possible to reply to something that has been written, digital technology has speeded up this process so that it is something equivalent to a conversational exchange. And because it is so common place, let’s not forget that texting hasn’t been around that long.

Technologists seem to agree that the first text message was sent in December 1992, and this could be seen as a turning point in the history of writing – the point at which it became possible to write a message that appeared almost immediately in someone else’s ‘graphic space’. Although emails had been in use since the early 1970s, discussion boards some ten years later, and IRCs (Internet relay chats) from the early 1980s, text messaging and its rapid take up has changed what we can do with writing, and it has certainly transformed everyday communication practices. Despite the fact that writing has always allowed us to communicate across time and space, this has usually depended on the movement (distribution or discovery) of a physical object – the text – and its delivery into the hands of the reader. When the speed of distribution is reduced to the speed of an Internet connection, writing and responding have the aura of immediacy, often suggesting a sort of remote co-presence, despite the fact that this ‘ideal’ state is only sporadically achieved. Immediacy, even if it is an imagined immediacy, is a mixed blessing. It can be advantageous, for instance, in coordinating our arrangements, or problematic if it implies that we must be tethered to our mobile devices all the time and alert to any incoming message (the condition referred to as hyperavailability³).

Before moving on, there is another no less radical effect of that interruption – the additional stage between mark-making and display. It relates once again to the flexibility or fungibility of strings of Unicode, or what the writer perceives as blocks of text. Words, sentences, paragraphs and larger chunks of text can be moved around at will – copied, cut, pasted and deleted, moved into another template altogether, used, re-used, indented, justified and so on. In other words, the average user of a word-processing package has considerable control over the design principle of writing. For example, I can lift those words ‘the average user has considerable control over the design principle’ out of the thing-that-looks-like-a-page on my screen and publish it on my personal blog, paste it into Twitter, or just send it to a colleague to comment on by email. This would take a few seconds and could be achieved with a few keystrokes. The written message itself would look different, because of the different design principles or template of each text type. In my blog, I could put it alongside an image, categorize it as a post on writing and technology and on Twitter I could add a hashtag or insert a hyperlink to a journal article. Perhaps, I might insert a few emojis to signal tentativeness in the email. In each text type, there are limitations to what I can do, in terms of design, but the point is that I can easily change the look of what I write and in doing this create a new text – or at least a new iteration of an existing text.

9.2 New Technologies of Writing

The idea that writing has always been used to record and store information, as well as to relay and regulate its flow has been a refrain throughout this book. As we have seen in the previous chapters, writing has been used to control people, to develop and distribute knowledge as well as to report on events real and imagined – to entertain as well as to divert. And writing has gradually become a central feature of our daily lives, at home and at work – as well as in the places in between. But all of these uses of writing were developed well before digital technologies, and most of them have been replicated or slightly adapted in their wake. So, do we do anything with digital writing that is substantively different from what we have done before?

In the early years of the Internet, many scholars and commentators, myself included, saw digital literacy as a radical departure from earlier forms of communication. Phrases like ‘paradigm shift’, ‘post-typographic’ and ‘digital revolution’ were bandied about. Friends and collaborators rallied around the idea of ‘new literacies’, which was used to identify and explore fundamental changes ‘in the character and substance’ of communication associated with ‘larger changes in technology, institutions, media and the economy’.⁴ Colin Lankshear and Michele Knobel, leading figures in this movement, offered perceptive and clearly articulated insights into the changes afoot. They claimed that what was new included both a technical dimension – the kinds of thing I refer to above as a technology for writing, and a change of ethos, predicated on a shift in priorities and values, and the emergence of new social and cultural arrangements. This change of ethos could be seen in practices that were participatory, collaborative and distributed. It was an ethos very much in evidence in the early days of social software, when developments often rather clumsily referred to as ‘Web 2.0’ began to attract attention.⁵ At this time, the appetite for publishing on the Internet, for commenting online and working in new ways was exhilarating. One of my first blogposts, written on 15th December 2003, captures some of this enthusiasm and sense of exploration:

As my own experimentation with Web 2.0 progressed there was a clear sense of something developing that seemed to be genuinely participatory, collaborative and distributed. Discussion boards, blogs, wikis, online games and virtual worlds seemed to be in the vanguard of new literacy. You weren’t just a passive reader of other people’s websites, you could create your own, contribute to discussions, leave comments and so on. Since then, online communication seems to have become somewhat narrower, more constrained by large and influential ‘tech giants’ and often conducted on platforms which provide a sort of corporate technological infrastructure (such as Meta and Google). Perhaps what is left over from those rather heady claims for participation and collaboration is a sense that, as digital communication has become normalized, the social element has come to the fore. In the short history of digital literacy, talk about the social web slowly gave way to thinking about online social networks and social software; today, we are more likely to use the umbrella concept of social media, but clearly, the idea of something social persists.

In Chapter 6, I explored the idea of a ‘republic of letters’, often associated with the written exchanges of scholars in sixteenth-century Europe. Looking back, we could say that movement was participatory, collaborative and distributed as well. So clearly those descriptions alone are not sufficient to define contemporary social media. The crucial difference seems to me to span three related effects of connectivity: immediacy, spread and the development of shared writing spaces. I described immediacy, and the impression of immediacy above – when portable devices and connectivity is available, we can have the sense that we are ‘always on’. By spread, I mean to include both the scale of social media use within societies, as well as its geographical distribution around the world. And by shared writing spaces, I mean to include all those applications in which multiple parties can join a written conversation, either through updates, joining threads or collaborating in other ways. Immediacy, spread and the availability of shared writing spaces give rise to the distinctive forms of participation associated with contemporary social media.

Although formats and templates give a particular look to these new writing spaces, they share a number of other features in common, too. New social media convey a sense of ‘ongoing-ness’ in that discussions are never usually concluded – they may stop, if an app is discontinued, or if a topic dries up or wanes in popularity, but that’s not quite the same. Social media threads have a linear, additive quality that doesn’t lend itself to a summary or conclusion. In most iterations, the temporal sequence is represented in a vertical scroll, usually with the most recent addition appearing at the top of the screen (as in Instagram or Twitter). In order to filter the flow of new information, individual users can personalize their experience of the text by creating their own feed, which may feature updates from friends or those who are ‘followed’. Described in this way we see writing conforming to quite new design principles. What appears on the screen is personalized by the reader, and in a way it is their text. It also constitutes another, rather different way of seeing text – text as a sort of multiparty dialogue – something in process, something you can re-arrange or add to, rather than a definitive authored product.

Put together, this all points to writing that certainly is different from what has gone before, made easy by the application of technologies for writing. But there seems to be another development to be added in, too. In social media, writing is being used for a wide variety of purposes. Although it seems more than likely that the majority of this is quite lightweight, being more about keeping in touch than anything else, it can be used for other purposes becoming a site for advertising and for circulating public information. But still, most social media involves a sort of communication that has been referred to as ‘phatic’ – communication in which the content or meaning is secondary to the purpose of initiating and maintaining social relations. Asking how someone is, or talking about the weather are common examples of this. In the first instance, we often aren’t especially interested in how someone really is, it’s more about connecting with that person. The very English habit of talking about the weather may not actually be the expression of a keen interest in rain or snow – getting into a conversation is the main goal. Using the written word as a medium for phatic or lightweight communication is a fairly recent development in the history of writing. But making a hard distinction between phatic and content-driven communication may not, in the long run, be that useful, because often one shades into the other. ‘How are you?’ may be a conventional opener but more specific new information or content may subsequently arise. In Chapter 8 I traced some of the possible origins of using writing to establish and maintain social networks. The exchange of greeting cards and postcards could be seen as an earlier form of social media. But social media and messaging apps are now firmly embedded in many people’s lives and often they are concerned with relatively unimportant content, or information which is relevant to a relatively limited audience. However, as some of these writing spaces have gained in popularity, they have become concerned with more than this.

Lightweight social interactions may be the starting point and, initially at least, the lifeblood of social media, but these writing spaces have now become a marketplace for corporate advertising and political persuasion, for the dissemination of ideologies, for self-promotion and even for local and national government campaigns. They are place for grassroots activism as well as for distributing fake news. If there is a strong case to be made for where writing now matters, perhaps we should look no further than the massive and highly influential social media platforms of contemporary life.

9.3 Hashtags and Hyperlinks

Connections, references and links between texts have long been thought to be central to understanding written discourse. Well before the Internet, it was suggested that written texts always exist in relation to others, to what has been written or read previously, either in a direct way (such as through quotation or parody) or indirectly (someone has written that kind of thing before). Written texts are in a kind of conversation with each other. Julia Kristeva⁶ coined the term intertextuality to describe this state of affairs. Needless to say, the idea of intertextuality is equally applicable to digital writing. Hyperlinking – the capacity to link directly with another digital object, whether in the same text or in another text adds a new dimension to intertextuality. When we insert a link in our writing it functions rather like an invitation, a possible pathway for the reader to follow. A cursor click can take the reader directly to the source document.

Hashtags (eg: #BlackLivesMatter⁷)and devices like Twitter handles (names like @guymerchant) use this hyperlinking facility to group posts by topic or by user, thus increasing one’s ability to search and join a particular theme, or filter posts according to who has written them. In other words, they are technical devices that support one’s ability to order or navigate a way through large amounts of written material. In doing this, two things are achieved. Firstly, users of a particular platform are able to group together around shared interests, and secondly, an individual is able to signal their allegiance to particular ideas, interests or campaigns. Not only does this hyperlink architecture support personalization then but it also supports the spread of ideas. The latter effect is of significance in grassroots activism and has certainly helped to raise awareness on issues like racism and climate change. On the other hand, the rise of Twitter, in particular, as a forum for political communication has been influential in populist movements and perhaps most notoriously in Donald Trump’s rise to power.⁸ One by-product of the influence of the ‘tech giants’ referred to above is the prevalence of a social media infrastructure that aims to keep the user on one particular platform. Technologists refer to this as a ‘walled garden’. Social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, use their own web browsers to open links within the app itself. This makes it more likely that the user will remain in the app, so that more content, or advertising can be fed to them. A walled garden subtly regulates and constrains what is available to users.

9.4 The Changing Topology of Communication

For a chapter concerned with the future of writing, a description of current practices is not quite enough. Outlining what writing practices look like now and how they have changed is a starting point only to the extent to which it allows us to identify trends. A few of these stand out. For example, from what has gone before, it seems quite clear that the move from page to screen will continue as a direction of travel. This doesn’t suggest that print and paper-based writing is about to die out, but that digital media will progressively become an easier, a more convenient and a more obvious choice. We might also predict the evolution of less cumbersome mark-making devices and perhaps more adaptable screens – and these are developments that follow the well-trodden paths of technological innovation. Keyboards can be cumbersome things. Inherited from the era of the typewriter, the logic of their layout – to prevent the type levers of commonly used letters from jamming – no longer applies. On a desktop or laptop, we type on a horizontal plane, but view the text at right angles to this. Are these the best we can come up with, or are they just what we’ve got used to? What technologists refer to as the ‘user interface’, or what, in this book, is referred to as a mark-making device may be due for an upgrade. Whether or not that will involve typing directly from our brains as some innovators suggest seems at the moment more like science fiction than something that’s about to happen anytime soon.

Following on from the earlier exploration of social media, we might also predict a steady development or diversification here too, including perhaps, the evolution of online writing spaces for more sophisticated and nuanced cultural and political debate. Such things are in the realm of possibility. But it also seems that contemporary configurations of technology hint at deeper-level changes in how writing gets done and how it relates to other modes of communication – what I am referring to here as changes in the topology of communication. A few examples will illustrate my point.

At a number of different points in this book, I have alluded to the conversational nature of written exchanges in messaging services. Their characteristically rapid, interactive and sometimes unpunctuated form often makes them seem more like speech than the writing. Even before they started appearing on our screens in speech bubbles, they were being described as chats. This suggests that in some instances, at least, writing is moving closer to speech. As if to underline this, WhatsApp, by allowing users to include voice-notes, makes it easy to include a spoken turn in an otherwise written conversation, or of course to switch entirely to a back-and-forth audio exchange. Automatic speech-to-writing transcription is now far more accurate and in recent years it has become relatively easy to dictate an email or to read an answerphone message. Using an Echo Dot, I can say ‘Alexa, add pumpkin seeds to my shopping list’, and when I access my app in the supermarket, there it is – pumpkin seeds, on a written list. Advances in automatic transcription really do suggest a major change in writing. All the ground that I have covered on the history of mark-making seems less relevant if writing is to become a simple transcription of the spoken word.

As much as speech-to-writing software may be useful for lists and short messages, what I described in Chapter 4 as ‘thinking with writing’ may be harder to achieve in this way. Extended pieces of writing, texts that develop an argument, explore multiple threads, or develop a complex narrative need the written form, to hold information, to take over the cognitive load or to store what would otherwise be too hard to hold in mind. Quite simply extended writing allows time for deliberation, to develop more precision in meaning, and this is partly because it is freed from the immediacy of real-time interaction. Despite all this, it seems that a blurring of the divide between speech and writing is most likely to become prevalent in the case of shorter utterances and interactive exchanges – and maybe this is already happening in the world of texting. Finally, whilst on this theme, we might also predict more traffic between the two modes. Are there instances in which our writing style is moving closer to a spoken form? And does our speech borrow more from written forms – or are those occasions in which we say ‘LOL’ or use our fingers to indicate scare quotes just outliers?

If there is a shift in the relationship between speech and writing, there are also important changes in the relationship between word and image, as we observed in Chapter 3. As many commentators have pointed out, there is nothing new in combining words and images. From Tifinagh inscriptions on Berber rock art to illustrations on Medieval manuscripts, image and writing have long been close companions. Technological development has, however, made it far easier to bring the two into close proximity and dialogue with one another as they share the same graphic space. Here again, social media and messaging apps are cases in point. In both, there is a seamless interplay between word and image. Earlier developments – particularly in printing and photography feed into this development, too. In the twentieth century, advertisers were for the first time able to display billboard-sized images of photographic quality, magazines like National Geographic prided themselves on high-quality photojournalism, and there was a general proliferation of colour printing, home photography as well as a rapid growth and development in moving image and cinematic production and distribution. All these histories are drawn upon in the multimedia context of online communication. Although this book has focused on the written word, in much of everyday life writing takes its place alongside other modes of communication, and a new sensibility in appreciating visual images has emerged. Because of its prominence in contemporary culture, it is arguably the case that we now read the visual in more subtle ways, and our continual exposure to multimodal texts in some ways normalizes more complex readings across modes. This topic is, of course, both extensive and important, receiving detailed coverage in some important key texts.⁹

It has also been suggested that new developments in communication, and particularly online interaction bring reading and writing closer together. This claim may be harder to gauge, partly because they are already so closely woven together. It’s pretty difficult to write anything at all without reading it back, and although it is certainly possible to be able to read without being able to write, it is difficult – perhaps impossible – to conceive of writing without reading. The rise of interactive writing is an obvious example of a more rapid movement between reading and writing. Although we can be passive on a social media site like Twitter, it’s far more common to be both a reader and a writer in such environments. Consider also the very act of searching, whether it’s done to gather information, to follow a thread or whatever – it usually involves typing in keywords, phrases or titles in order to find what we want to read in the first place. There is also a more fundamental way in which reading and writing are interwoven and we see this in the rise of predictive text, and the appearance of stock phrases in email applications. These change writing to something more like making a menu choice. We have to read back, or in the case of predictive text check the spelling, in order to write and send an appropriate message.

This takes us into the realm of machine-generated text, which introduces a further dimension to writing relationships. Most of us are now familiar with automated messages. Perhaps the most commonly used is the ‘out of office’ email, which is something akin to the written equivalent of an answerphone prompt. Increasingly, though, we are likely to encounter automated responses, and with the growing sophistication of chatbots and AI, it may be a challenge to work out whether we are communicating with a person or a machine. It seems entirely feasible that we will encounter this more as systems increase in sophistication, and as more and more routine operations, enquiries and communications get delegated to machines. As an experiment, I asked the AI chatbot, ChatGPT,¹⁰ the question that animates this book: Why does writing matter? In under 30 seconds, the chatbot replied with the following:

This really does seem like a seismic shift in the history of writing, and raises issues that I explore more fully in the concluding chapter.

9.5 Playfulness

The themes explored so far in this chapter all suggest that we are currently in the midst of a period of widespread innovation in writing, a time that extends its possibilities and raises questions about what it is for and what it can do. Earlier in this chapter I referred to my own experiences of experimenting, researching and writing about Web 2.0 – the early days of what we now call social media. At this time there was a sense of adventure around the possibilities of the read-write web.¹¹ It was a time of playful experimentation. This spirit of playfulness around digital writing continues to be generative, and I offer some examples in what follows. Before this though, I want to emphasize that playfulness (and what sometimes amounts to subversion) isn’t something that everyone engages in. Digital writing isn’t all about play. In fact, in some jurisdictions, it is subject to restriction, regulation and censorship, just like older forms of communication.

It’s also worth noting that playfulness in writing isn’t limited to the world of digital communication. The slogan in Figure 9.1 stencilled onto a brick wall makes a joke as well as a more serious comment on consumerism, whereas the recent excavation of a 4,000-year-old ivory nit comb embellished with the words ‘May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard’ shows how writing has been used to comment on some of the more down to earth matters of personal hygiene (Vainstub et al., Reference Vainstub, Mumcuoglu, Hasel, Hesler, Lavi, Rabinovich, Goren and Garfinkel2022). Experiments in playfully contracting written words were common when there was a cost to pay (in the days of the telegram) and when graphic space was limited (as on postcards). It could even be argued that the rebus principle¹² itself is based on a sort of linguistic playfulness.

Figure 9.1 The best things.

In the early days of SMS, the use of abbreviations in texting created something of a moral panic. Texting with its proliferation of OMGs, LOLs and C U L8Rs divided opinion. Many people felt that it was a direct threat to ‘proper’ writing, whereas others (admittedly a minority) saw it as the most recent example of linguistic creativity.¹³ Text-speak and the related innovation of emoticons, such as the smiley –:) fulfilled at least two functions. Firstly, these innovations were economically driven, becoming popular at a time when service providers were limiting the length of a message to 160 characters and charging for individual text messages. The effect of this was to tempt users to be as concise as possible and to reduce the number of characters where they could. Reducing ‘you’ to ‘u’ might not be much, but it mattered when the number of characters mattered. Secondly, given these limitations there was a need to avoid sounding emotionally blunt – LOL, OMG and an occasional smiley could help in adding a little nuance to a message. In chatrooms, in particular, other considerations came into play, too. Sometimes relatively obscure abbreviations and emoticons could act to signal group membership, helping to distinguish insiders from newbies, functioning in a similar way that jargon sometimes does. In addition to this, in real-time chat, typing in your comment needs to be done quickly before the thread changes direction or a new topic is introduced. In situations like this, abbreviations and emoticons could be used as a time-saving device.

In a lot of ways, emojis take over where text-speak left off. They have provoked the same sort of outrage from the language purists and the same feelings of exclusion from those who have yet to become familiar with them. They are also extremely popular, particularly on social media and in informal messaging. Emojis are not a form of writing in the way that it has been defined in this book. This is not to relegate them to a lesser class, but merely to assert that they do not fulfil the essential characteristics of a developed visible language. But, of course, they are written, and they are used alongside and in combination with written languages. As I write this, there are over 3,500 registered emojis, comprised of glyphs, symbols and pictograms. Like letters and characters, they are built from Unicode. Some of the most popular emojis are: . Originally created by the Japanese company NTT DoCoMo, their popularity spread until some of the tech giants started campaigning to include emojis in Unicode.¹⁴ This campaign was to meet with success in 2010.

There are some important aspects of the widespread uptake of emojis that deserve some serious treatment here. Although they may be playfully used, a bit of a shared experiment in communication, they are also an important means of expression across languages. At least on the surface, they are clear representations of objects, actions and gestures, a rudimentary dictionary of glyphs – a mix of pictograms and ideograms. However, any claim to their universality must be treated with a degree of caution. If meaning is culturally constructed, even representational images (pictograms) may be read differently. For example, facial expressions may be interpreted differently in different cultural contexts. Even the most straightforward-looking emoji carries with it a level of ambiguity. This potential for ambiguity is illustrated by the ways in which some emojis have acquired a double meaning, such as using the aubergine emoji to refer to the penis.¹⁵ In most cases, though, it’s probably true to say that the use of emojis adds an element of emotional framing to a written message in a way that a shrug or a smile might in spoken interaction, and this is particularly useful in the short conversational exchanges associated with social media.

An entirely different kind of playfulness has begun to emerge in popular adaptations of Chinese characters. Here, a practice known as ‘tranβcripting’ has developed – I will use the more straightforward ‘transcripting’ from here on.¹⁶ Transcripting involves mixing different writing systems or scripts and adapting characters by using symbols to create new, or modified character meanings. For example, combining the animal radical ‘niu’ (cow) with the alphabetic letter ‘b’ creates the novel two-syllable character ‘niubi’ which stands for ‘awesome’, and also includes a scatological element.¹⁷ This is an example of playful and inventive re-working of writing. Other examples have more of a political edge, such as those used by students and pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong that incorporated the alphabetic letters HK in characters that express anti-China sentiments (eg: ‘Thief of Hong Kong’ and ‘Hong Kong Independence’). The overarching point here is that languages and writing systems are now more regularly in contact with one another and this presents new opportunities for improvisation. As online communication continues to reach beyond the traditional divisions of nation-states and regions, translanguaging and transcripting practices are likely to continue changing and blurring the boundaries between writing systems and scripts. Although the dream of a universal language may be unrealistic – particularly if one believes that language use flourishes in specific communities and tends towards diversification, different kinds of writing are much more likely to rub shoulders with one another in a connected world. A global sensitivity involves acknowledging and embracing multilingualism in all its forms.

We can never really predict the future, but recognizing that we are in a period of substantial change and innovation in writing may help us to focus on why it still matters. What we do with writing, how it is interwoven with social practices, projects and concerns seems to me to be more important than many of the technical concerns that have threaded through this chapter. But, of course, the technical is never really separate from larger issues, it is woven into our private and public lives, shaping the cultural and political worlds we inhabit, and as we use our communicative resources we are helping to shape them, too.