Interjections and emojis: the digital reversal of literacy back to the origin of speech
The growth of public use of interjections, the most ‘non-semiotic’ of verbal means, clearly indicates the reversal of culture from literate to oral. A chapter from “Postjournalism and the death of newspapers” (2020).
The early speech had to be a sort of vocal-dance performance, in which pointing gestures and emotional exclamations helped hunters and gatherers deliver messages to their fellow tribesmen. At the early speech stage, human communication was more about persuasion than information.
Interjections and exclamations, the oldest human words, combined emotions with early attempts to replace objects with signs. To this day, interjections remain context-bound, tied to the situations of their use. Their semiotic function—the symbolic representation of objects—remains weak.
The divide between reality and its representation in the human mind is intrinsically semiotic; it is the split between the signified and the signifier. The semiotic capacity of the mind, including speech, allows us to engage with reality in its absence—through signs. (The ultimate detachment of signifier from signified, the phonetic alphabet, as McLuhan noted, incited a schizophrenic state of mind: “Schizophrenia and alienation may be the inevitable consequences of phonetic literacy.” – McLuhan, 1969).
Literacy did not require interjections and exclamations unless it was a written record of oral speech. Radio and television brought vocal signals and gestures back into mediated socially significant communication. Interjections, in which the ‘lack of semiotics’ is compensated for by emotional charge, became an important means of expressing meaning on TV shows. Participants on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, whom she talks to, immediately begin shouting interjections. Of course, they are encouraged to do so, but this is because it reflects and recreates the pattern of public behavior assigned to this type of media. How else can one overcome the emotional fatigue of a saturated audience if not by yelling louder? By promoting emotional exaggeration, television maintains and reinforces this pattern of public behavior, which then extends to any publicly exposed talks.
This kind of emotional exaggeration represents not feelings, but intensities, exactly as described by Lyotard and Jameson. The postmodernist shift from feelings to intensities goes hand in hand with the replacement of literacy by orality and the retribalization of culture through electronic media.
The interjections’ revolution creeps into news and political TV shows, as they are mostly filled with experts, not reporters, due to the dominance of opinion journalism. These make TV shows, even the news ones, increasingly conversational. The conversational delivery of news and any TV content naturally invites more interjections to supplant other parts of speech. The growth of the public use of interjections, the most ‘non-semiotic’ of verbal means, clearly indicates the reversal of culture from literate to oral. And this reversal is media-determined, as interjections are not needed in literate speech (unless they quote or simulate oral speech). It is the orality of TV and radio that allowed interjections to become a more significant part of content delivery.
Digital media took the retribalization of speech and the mind even further, reversing not just literacy, but speech itself.
Any behavior on social media is ‘addressed’ to the audience by default; everyone has become a broadcaster facing the audience’s fatigue. The emancipation of authorship has led millions to the necessity of overcoming the audience's unresponsiveness by increasing intensities. In digital orality, the 'evolution' of transmitting intensities has reached the core semantic structures of speech, closing the gap between the signifier and the signified
In digital communication, verbal interjections have been replaced or complemented by graphical abbreviations (‘lol,’ ‘omg,’ etc.) and emojis. Emojis are purely iconic, not symbolic or indexical signs. An emoji’s signifier invokes its signified by directly depicting the emotions it refers to. In digital media, the 'schizophrenic' detachment of the signifier from the signified, typical of literacy, shrinks.
Digital media reverses the semiotics of reality’s representation back to immediate interaction with the objects of reality – but now they are the objects of digital reality. The means of communication on Twitter or TikTok resemble the vocal-dance performance of primordial humans in our pre-speech era. Digital orality aims to persuade rather than inform. It operates with emotions and objects (memes, pictures, videos, etc.) directly, rather than with information that represents objects in their absence.
Not only is a post-literate – a post-speech era coming. McLuhan’s retribalization of society by electronic media is accelerated by the de-semiotization of culture through digital media. This is only logical, considering the forthcoming resettlement of humans into the medium – into the digital world, the induced reality of which will require direct operations with objects, mediated by the digital sensorium ‘immediately,’ with no need for the ‘replacing’ function of semiotics.
A chapter from “Postjournalism and the death of newspapers” (2020).
See also books by Andrey Mir:
The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology (2024)
Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (2024)
