Diary of a Programmer 11 Learning to Be Human
I just noticed that emojis don’t have timestamps.
Or, rather, it’s not that they don’t have timestamps,
it’s that their timestamps are never displayed.
Or, rather, it’s not that they are never displayed,
but that there is no gesture or interaction if the user
wants to display the timestamps of the emojis
in the text message exchange. Do you understand
the impact this has on the evolution of text communication?
It means that a wink emoji occurred both a minute after
the text was received and at the same time ten minutes after
and one hour and ten hours after the text was received.
Which means an utterance uttered by one (for now) human
that has a reaction by another (for now) human
now has a blurry delay of reaction time. Which has to have an impact
on the sense of time and rhythm in a conversation.
Basically it’s putting human flow all out of whack.
I mean pretty soon when we get together for a drink,
this bozo over there is going to say something so full of cheese
and then that bozo on the other side of his table,
some other joker in the group, is going to make the blowing
chunks/pretend vomit face, (or he just rolls his eyes),
to which everyone else is supposed to laugh,
but some people laugh two seconds after he does it,
and others laugh ten minutes after he does it,
and even one guy laughed three days after he did it
because now life imitates tech and tech imitates life.
So really you can see how fucked we are in terms of tech
talk grammatical shifts to the semantic system, during wine
nights with the boys and girls on the corner
of juxtapose street and misunderstanding avenue.