“[T]his invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of learners, with the neglect of their memory, because their trust in writing comes from strange external marks and not their own internal recall.,” King Thamos to the Egyptian God, Thoth. King Thamos was afraid that writing would replace memory since we have to rely on writings to recall our ideas. Although there is some validity to this worry, our own “internal recall” is what started the simple recognition of language in the form of iconography, or the Egyptian form of hieroglyphs. Their language was set on metonymy—image representing a noun.
Till this day, iconography or icons are used to facilitate the understanding of textual boxes in design or on their own to represent their pertaining actions. This can be seen various mobile applications, such as for Twitter. For example, under each post, there are small icons that correspond to its action.
♡ = ?
One such icon is the ‘like’ button. Right away, the twenty-first century viewer can assume that the heart icon is for demonstrating appreciation towards a person’s post. If this were Ancient Egypt, the equivalent icon would be the ‘man with hand to mouth.’
? = ? = ?
Icons can also be placed next to text to interpret its said actions, such as for ‘Profile.’ In Ancient Egypt, the hieroglyph(s) would be the only pictural and textual representation for the word. For us, it is just an embellishment or a user-centered spotlight. As you can see, the equivalent iconography for ‘profile’ would be ‘seated man’ or ‘seated woman.’
As you can see, iconography is universal and has always been. Ancient Egyptians used icons as metaphors to facilitate the understanding text. Till this day, we still use it to facilitate the understanding of text, in addition to highlighting it. For these reasons, iconography continues to be iconic.
I am viewing this on a mac computer and your icons in text show up as boxes so I can’t see what you are talking about. Feel free to post images inline where needed to make sure we can all see what you are talking about.
Nice analysis overall.
Oh no! I wrote it on my MacBook so I’m not sure how that might have happened. I’ll try to fix it as soon as possible.
I was very surprised to see that you are not using images but real hieroglyphs. The existence of hieroglyphic icons in our mobile phones makes me feel that people nowadays still cherish ancient culture.
Your observation is engaging. It is interesting to see the connections between actions and icons.