Marcienne Martin

Dictionary of Digital Pictograms and Glossary for Internet Use and Portable Telephones Marcienne Martin

This book explores the new language of the Internet which offers a middle ground between expressiveness and speed. It also reports on innovative lexicographic practices. Internet users want their written communication to be as fast as that present in oral exchanges; they also want to convey feelings and emotions, and for that they use pictographic symbols. This new system proceeds from the same construction that presided over the establishment of hieroglyphs and ideograms, namely the initialization of semantic fields from basic graphs. Is this not a re-appropriation of ancient know-how? In the long run, will this virtual society, composed of a sum of individuals aggregated around playful projects, not be the necessary counter-power to more and more bureaucratic societal systems? Would this system move beyond the virtual to penetrate the real?