SEOULSET

Amongst the most famous classic dystopias, I’ve read Fahrenheit 451 published in 1953 and 1984 published in 1949.

In 1984 we are introduced to a world that is divided in 3 states - Oceania, Eurasia and Lestasia. The Big Brother controls everything inside Oceania - the history, the information, and ultimately peoples lives. The party manipulates the past to serve in their favor an creates a common enemy to whom people can canalize their hatred towards to - Goldstein. Is forbidden to love it’s forbidden to even think something that might be considered against the party and even the language is manipulated - less words so people have less power when expressing their feelings. Children become spies shaped by the government as the government’s most fiercest allies. Inside every home there is a device called “telescreen” that basically monitors and records everything, any manifestation of disagreement or discontent are enough to make someone disappear in this world.

1984 gives us a very uncanny description of the espionage system that our capitalistic democracies rely on. Orwell died before the Internet came to our lives but now for the first time in human history it is possible to apply the same type of control that he describes in the book on people. After Edwards Snowden revealed the NSA was spying on people by collecting data of phone calls and so on, this novel’s sales jumped, the same happened right after Donald Trump won the U.S. election, 1984 became the 1 best-selling on Amazon, 70 years after it’s first publication.

So what are the similarities? What first comes to my mind is what it’s called Newspeak in the book - a language created to satisfy the regime’s ideologic needs. Controlling a language is the same as controlling people’s thoughts. If we can’t find words to express what we feel and think therefore we don’t express our feelings and our thoughts, that was the primary goal of the party. That brings me to what is being called the “New Language” in today’s world - the Emoji language. In 2015, Oxford's word of the year was the "Face with Tears of Joy" emoji. As of June 2017 there are 2,666 emojis in the Unicode Standard. And while there is no definite answer to how many words exist in the English Language, the second edition of the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary contains full entries for 171,476 words in current use and 47,156 obsolete words. Some years ago when I had my first Nokia I remember we had a limited amount of characters so we had to cut the words, condense them in a understandable way to fit in one message. The same happens on Twitter where we can only fit text in 140 characters. The main question is if in fact this new way of communication improved our capacity of understanding each other. In 2015 a 17 year old Black Lives Matter supporter was arrested because of a post on twitter. It was considered a terrorist threat to use emojis of a policemen and revolvers.

While we can argue that Emoji overcomes language barriers and that is a global language, it seems to me that Emojis are also changing the meaning of our words and most certainly will replace our languages in the future. With augmented reality we will be able to use Emojis on our face to face interactions and we won't need so many words anymore.