The Emoticon Generation (2 page)

“I don’t care,” says Anthony.

What Anthony is saying, in his teenager-y way, is that he has found his niche, and the rest he chooses to ignore. What I say is true, but what he says is also true. He doesn’t need to use all the tools of poetry to create good poetry. Sometimes it’s good enough to master a niche.

Apparently, others believe him to be so good as to enable to him to tell me in a straight face, “I am the first poet of a new language. What I do today to the emoticon language... centuries from now people will learn it in schools.” Later on, he tells me his dream is to be America’s poet laureate and to one day exchange emoticons with the President on a daily basis.

As maddening as that may sound to us, his poetry and what he expresses with it have struck a chord in today’s youth. Not only his poems, but his philosophy, are echoed in internet forums across the world. Is that because he is right? Or because he gives them an excuse not to learn more than the little they already know?

The sad thing is that there is truth behind their opinions. Some of the beauty found in language is often found in the way we make up for the language’s limitations. The more words we have, the more each word means exactly one thing, the more we have words for each and every thought or concept that occurs to us. It’s getting to the ridiculous point where words that shouldn’t exist, do. My favorite example for the over-richness of our language is this: ‘Mopery’ means the act of denuding oneself in front of a blind person. What occasion brought on the need for this word, one wonders. Was there an epidemic? How about ‘defenestration’, the act of throwing someone or something out a window? Another epidemic?

Language started out with a poor vocabulary and grew and grew and grew over the last thousands of years. Alongside it, our knowledge grew just as quickly, and words were created to fit what we knew. In the last century and a half, our knowledge has grown by factors of thousands every decade. As knowledge increased, the vocabulary of specialized words increased with it. How many words do doctors know that you’ve never heard of? (Acrocyanosis, schistosomiasis, bilharziasis? No?) Engineers? (Asynchrony, aliasing, aceltahyde? Anything?) Physicists? (Fraunhofer lines? N-type semiconductor? Nothing?) Biologists? (Rectrices? Allula?) Computer programmers? (Alpha Skip? Metaheuristic?) Mathematicians? (Automorphism?) Journalists? (Nutgraf?)

The more words we have, the less we need metaphors, similes, or lyricism. Is our great knowledge also our downfall? Are emoticons, as absurd and simple as they are as a vocabulary, bringing our poetry back? Would the new generation, Generation E, find lyricism again? Would it have to fall off vocabulary space and forget what we have worked so hard to know, to revive something of what we have lost? Because God knows, today’s kids don’t know many other words.

This is what Anthony has been claiming all along: a small vocabulary is a plus. Here is how he describes his process, “When I write poetry, I forget everything I know, forget the words. I concentrate on feelings. A sentence of mine can be the sequence of feelings, emoticons, and the sequence is beautiful. Sometimes I put real words next to real emotions. The connection is beautiful.”

Here is one of Anthony’s famous poems, called ‘Poetry’. For trademark purposes, we are not able to visually show the emoticons themselves. I wrote a short description between brackets in lieu of every emoticon. Hold on to your hats. You’re not going to like this.

POETRY
By Anthony R

Rhymes... [Sad face]
Meaning... [A face with its tongue out]
Symbolism... [A face, with its hand giving us a thumbs down]
Old School... [A face, with its hand giving us the finger]
Generation E... [A face, with its 2 hands giving us two thumbs up]

Is Anthony’s point lessened, strengthened, or unaffected by the fact that you have now read his poetry?

It doesn’t matter. Because emoticon poetry is but a speck in the inertia machine that is Generation E. On the one side is a single, next-generation poet on a dial-up connection, overwhelming the minds of the young from his mother’s basement in Blue Diamond, NV. On the other side is the business world. Oddly enough, the CEO whose products are most popular with today’s teenagers is echoing Anthony’s sentiments.

“People don’t need words,” Mark Fox, CEO of Ping!, Inc., tells me. “People need attention.”

We’re seated in the cafeteria of the spanking new offices of Ping! Fox had just bought an entire office building in downtown Chicago for the use of his up-and-coming high-tech company. Six months earlier, when he released his first product to the internet wild, no one had heard of him. Today, his product, the Ping!, is used even more than Twitter, and has just earned him a reported 1 billion in investment dollars.

Mark Fox is a charming 30 year old man, neatly shaven, subtly new to suits, and much more grounded than you would expect a man who had just signed the deal of 10 lifetimes to be.

“There are only two words people really need to be able to say,” Fox explains. “One says ‘give me attention’, the other says ‘bug off’. That’s it. Start to finish. If you have food on your plate, and you are not fighting for your life, the only vocabulary you’ll need is those two words.” Then he adds with a wink, “If you’re honest with yourself, that is.”

Ironically, in Ping! Fox has come up with exactly two words, but different than the ones he insists we need to say. It began with only one word. Remember the inexplicable exclamation marks and moon icons I found in my daughter’s iPhone? Those are Fox’s. They are each a word which we do not have in the English language.

The idea came to Fox one night, when he was reading a friend’s tweets. The particular tweet that caught Fox’s attention was comprised only of half words, abbreviations, and emoticons. Suddenly Fox saw a jumble of symbols, and he began to understand words differently. “It was an apple-just-fell-on-my-head moment,” he says.

Fox was haunted by the clarity of what emoticons really were: “Emoticons are not words, they’re smaller than words.” Without realizing what he was doing, he walked out of the house, and sat in the street for hours, until, at 4 a.m., it came to him.

“The thought that haunted me was: how small could a word be and still be a word? What is the minimum feeling I would ever have to convey?” In those few hours, he played around with thousands of words and concepts and emotions, looking for the smallest one possible. In the end, he found it.

“I found it!” he exclaims, and there’s fire in his eyes today. He really does see himself as another Newton, discovering something that has been in front of our eyes but never been acknowledged. “One word and one word only. The only word you would ever need.” He leans in closer, and his eyes sparkle. “Ping!” he whispers.

A Ping! is written as an exclamation mark and it carries with it meaning only teenagers are (so far) aware of. When a person sends someone else a Ping!, he is saying, “I’m thinking of you”. Or, in Fox’s lingo, that would be “I’m giving you attention”.

Remember? People don’t need words, according to Fox, they need attention.

The instant Ping! was released into the internet wild, it spread like wildfire among the tweeting teens.

Within a week, teenagers across the U.S. and, in fact, the world, were sending exclamation marks to each other. The second a teenager receives an exclamation mark, he or she can send one back. Girlfriends can tell their boyfriends they’re thinking of them. Boyfriends can communicate with and flatter their girlfriends, without needing to resort to those pesky conversations. Secret admirers can send Pings to their objects of desire. Not only did high schools across the world become hotbeds for attention, attention had to be given back.

A week after that, everything changed. “Evolution in the internet is so quick,” says Fox. “If you blink for a few days, you’ve missed something. And then you’re dead.”

Fox never blinks. He noticed that after a week, people were not satisfied with sending single Pings!. People were sending five, ten, fifteen, twenty exclamation marks in a row. Teenagers wanted to show how they really really really
really
feel, and one ‘really’ wasn’t enough. Messages in Facebook and Twitter and emails and text messages were filled with dozens and sometimes hundreds of Pings! in a row.

In a day, Fox came up with and released the next product on his line: Colored Pings! A normal black Ping! is a regular exclamation mark. A yellow Ping! (a yellow exclamation mark) stands for five Pings! An orange Ping! stands for 10 Pings! And so on: Red is a hundred, green is a thousand, purple is fifty thousand, and blue is infinity.

Cut to a few days later, and Fox’s premise that we don’t need any other words seemed truer than ever. All over the country, high schools, college campuses, grade schools and junior high schools were filled with teens not playing around, but sitting down and exchanging endless Pings! back and forth. I’ve seen a few security videos of some of these schools. It’s like a scene out of Hitchcock’s
The
Birds
.

This is something slightly incomprehensible to us older folks: How can pressing one button, how can sending one icon that says ‘a thousand Pings!’ actually be proof of love? There’s no effort in it. It’s just one character. I wonder, is there something to my sentiments, or am I just being an old doof saying how things were different ‘when I was young’?

Fox certainly believes that sending it is meaning it. He bought his wife a parrot and taught him to say exactly one word: “Ping!” His wife works from home and Fox works from the office. But still, when he’s not there, she hears it all the time: “Ping!” “Ping!” “Ping!”

Okay, so the Ping! was popular. But how pervasive is it? Ask Hollywood. Released only last week (at the time of writing this) is Patrick Dempsey’s first directorial attempt in 15 years,
The Ping Queen
, a remake of one of the movies he starred in, back when we were both teenagers:
Can’t Buy Me Love
. Its plot: An unpopular high-school girl wants to become popular. She teams up with a geek who figures out how to send her Pings! and make it look like she received it from many admirers. The number of Pings! she gets makes her instantly popular in school, able to choose the best jocks to take out to the dance. In the end, she learns how shallow success is and falls in love with the geek.

The last scene in the movie ends with the two getting closer to each other. “Ping!” he tells her saucily. “Ping,” she returns racily. As the camera moves up, you hear her say, as if in orgasm, “Ping ping ping!” and he returns, in an equally orgasmic tone, “Ping ping ping ping ping!” Credits roll. Movie ends.

Meanwhile, in TV world, the new season of Jersey Shore is rumored to have a character that refers to his penis as “The Ping Machine”. It’s sleazier than – but not as dirty as – it sounds. His ‘Ping Machine’ generates quite a lot of Pings! (attention, and positive at that,) from the women-folk. Thus it is a Ping!-generating machine.

The first Ping!-related arrest took place in Chicopee, Massachusetts. A young, 15-year-old kid was so enamored with a girl in class that he began to send her dozens of Pings! to her various email addresses, iPhone, and home computer. When he was told in no uncertain terms that his advances were not welcome, his socially inept mind forced him to continue to send her Pings! without end. First the teachers became involved, then the parents, and then the police. Boys that can’t speak to girls can still send them Pings!

Anthony Rockwell, the emoticon poet from Blue Diamond, Nevada, has used the Ping! in his poetry. Here is another one of his poems. Again, I will convey the meaning behind the different-colored Pings! rather than use the Pings! themselves.

AMERICA [Ping!]
By Anthony R

America [Ping!]
America [Five Pings!]
America [Ten Pings!]
America [A hundred Pings!]
America America America [Infinity Pings!]

Is this poem sad because America’s illiterate youth thinks it’s good, or is it actually good? Are Anthony’s patriotic feelings any lesser than mine, simply because I can express them in a beautifully-constructed sentence, while all he has to do is press a button on a machine?

Is this just teenagers being stupid? Or is something greater going on here? Is the inertia permanent, or will it change when the teenagers grow out of it, the same way the sixties’ hippies turned into the eighties’ yuppies?

Hold your judgment, please. You’ve only heard the first of Fox’s two ‘words’. There’s still another one coming, to finish off the revolution.

Let us return to the massively quick evolution of the internet world. Remember that Fox does not blink? Someone was faster than him. The teen world is filled with young and keen programmers looking for a new way to bend the rules. A small team, identity as yet unknown, came up with a program that distributes, on its own, constant attention to those you choose. The program has a basic AI, which allows it to send these Pings! at time intervals that seem random and not, say, every 30 minutes (or 30 seconds, if you’re a teenager,) on the dot. The AI allows the robotic program to appear less robotic.

Boyfriends no longer had to pay the even the smallest kind of attention to their girlfriends, when they weren’t together: they had a computer program that did it for them.

Rumors of this program’s existence quickly arrived on the female side of the web and knowledge spread. Now everyone had to find a way to Ping! that proved that it was you who was Ping!ing and not a computer. Suddenly, the Ping! wasn’t enough. The high-schools were already a mass of seething teens, craving ever-more-immediate attention. But now they were not able to get it.

This time, Fox did not blink and was the first to pull his gun out of his holster.

He had developed an online network that follows who a person Pings! The Ping!ing network tracks your friends’ Pings!, and you are able to track all the Pings! sent by anyone who acknowledged you as a friend on the network. Boys can’t send Pings! to two girls without the girls knowing about it. It became a sort of a chastity belt for male teens. But at the same time, it increased the number of Pings! the teens were exchanging. If you’re a girl, and you’d just sent one of your girlfriends a thousand Pings!, you’d just know that your other girlfriend will be insulted if you didn’t send her exactly the same number, if not more. Of course, by the time you reassured your second girlfriend, your first girlfriend forgot all your reassurance from earlier, and needs to be reassured again. And all Pings!, of course, had to be sent back with more meaning and more Pings! or the receiver of the Pings! would be insulted.