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Journal perfessor multigeek's Journal: smileys vs. characters

I've just been at the Plato smiley page and since I was just reading about the Sumerians, Babylonians, etc. today (catching up on my Middle Eastern history) it strikes me how consistently people, given the chance, prefer to have *both* phoneme-based and ideograph representational systems. Text and smileys, Kanji and Kana, ASL, etc.
I'm betting that, as this discussion goes on we're going to hear about special characters hacked with telegraph systems, semaphores, and so on. It seems to be a predictable behavior: give a representational system enough usage time and people will concoct images, medium-specific puns, blah, blah, blah.
So I guess that my question becomes, to what extent can this tendency be researched and documented so that common themes can be found? This should provide good demand-side priorities for creating a communications means. I certainly don't have the answer. Though I think that people like Kathleen Odean would be a good place to start.
Another perpective is that if people so universally work to create systems that are both phoneme and representation functional then there is probably some significant advantage to working in such a (dual capability) system. That would better explain how hobbled many Chinese and Japanese find roman character systems to be. Back to the drawing board again, I guess.
Of course, this whole entry can also be taken as yet another example of my coming back to the intersection of language, behavior, and procedure/systems design. I guess that I'm pretty predictable.
On a totally unrelated note, given the number of geeks who are into beer to a frightening degree, given the striding advance of passive, usually fiber optics based sensor systems, and given the geek tendency to show off/establish geek dominance, how long is it going to be before a fad comes around of beer aficianados carrying little pocket sensor systems with them when they go bar hopping? Can't you see it? "Waiter, send this back. A *fresh* Algerian double bock should have a foo rating of at least 7.4."
This scares me. Does it scare you?

Rustin
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smileys vs. characters

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