Mobile smart phones have become widely accessible and with them is the access to instant messaging; Through apps like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger sending a message to someone from your phone takes seconds and everyone is permanently available. With the advent of instant messaging, we lost something; which was the need to log onto a platform to communicate. By looking at how instant messaging has transformed from AOL Instant Messaging and Windows Messenger from the late 90’s to WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, I am hoping to examine what the possible future of messaging would be by comparing the different affordances offered by these platforms and how they have shaped communication.  For example; how the constant access we have to social media/instant messaging makes us less susceptible to phone calls but also through our continuous online status we have lost the urge to physically “log in”.

I have always wondered about the amount of information we consume online through our endless scrolling on different platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. 
I have been very self aware in the past couple months about how much content I’m consuming, especially through Reddit and Twitter and have been trying to minimize my consumption. 
The idea I got for how I wanted to procceed with rewiring stemmed from having multiple people point out that the text on my screen was too small. I have always preferred the smallest possible UI and the smallest possible font size. Besides being easier on my eyes it makes me go through more content than if I had a normal font size. 
As part of the assignment I proceeded to change my font and UI size to the largest possible option to test the affects it would have on me using my phone. 

Needless to say it was very affective. 

I heavily rely on my phone to avoid real-life social interactions, if I’m waiting at a queue at the dining hall or waiting for my coffee; I immediately start scrolling through Reddit or Twitter to avoid human contact. I wasn’t too sure that changing my font and UI size would actually work as the content is still there, but I was wrong. 

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My Home screen, Twitter and Reddit pages; Top photos are the new font size and UI

Although the exact same content remained I struggled to stay interested in what I was looking at because of how large everything was. It took most if not all of the screen’s space to show me two tweets, one of which would be an ad.  
For the 24-hours that I did this I found myself barely using phone and if I did I would immediately be discouraged and I’d shove it back in my pocket. Whenever I needed to search for something or use social media platforms I opted for going on my PC which requires more of an effort than a mobile phone. 
I gave up certain habits in those 24-hours that weren’t just avoiding human contact. I usually scroll through Reddit while trying to fall asleep and I completely gave that up when I tried “rewiring” myself, I could not bare browsing Reddit for more than 2 seconds. 

It’s evident in the photos above how much text size and UI affect how many posts you see. Two tweets versus 5 tweets, one Reddit post versus 4. 

Finally, I think this was a productive exercise for dealing with bad habits although I am pretty sure I will never do this again, mainly because I really hate having to deal with large fonts and UI’s. Nonetheless I feel like I have become more aware of how much content I tend to consume because of how easily acccessible everything is. 

I have never used Stack Exchange before (besides google searches that lead me to Stack Overflow) so my expectations were a little bit too high I would say. My initial assumption about Stack Exchange was that it seemed like it was Reddit, just different. I went in face-first and just opened different Stack Exchange tabs that aligned to my interests/skills.

I looked around a lot of the sites that I thought I could be useful in (Game Development, Arqade, SciFi, etc) only to realize they were either dead or had questions that were way too complicated for me to actually answer.

I dug through countless tags on Arqade just trying to find something I could contribute to as I thought that’s where most of my knowledge was. (spoiler alert: turns out I’m not knowledgeable enough). Most of the posts on the front page were all about Minecraft, something I never got into while anything else was months old which lead me to believe that the page is somewhat dead. I decided to check back later for new posts, as I might be lucky and find a new question that was not about Minecraft and I did.

Someone had asked a very detailed question about creating video games for the elderly and how from his experience they were always geared towards a certain genre of videogames. This person had asked a question that did not quite belong on the Arqade page but rather the Game Development one. So, I took it upon myself to redirect them to the other page because they are more likely to find a response there and it was mainly off-topic.

After profusely refreshing the page waiting for those points to start pouring in, I was hit with a downvote.  Needless to say, I was both angry and confused, I just helped out this guy immediately after he asked for help, but I was being downvoted instead of thanked? I checked and found that he had responded with something along the lines of “good idea.” A couple minutes later and I got another downvote. I am still both confused and angry but mainly confused as I clearly helped someone out who acknowledged my help, yet I was still getting downvoted. I got a notification that warned me that my post would be removed if one more person downvoted me, and they did. I was hit with the 3 downvotes and my answer was removed (Which is why I can’t post a screenshot.)

I carried my anger and confusion over to another page, Seasoned Advice which is meant for culinary work and found myself just digging for anything I could answer. I eventually stumbled upon someone who was looking for a specific fried egg recipe, with the information he had given it took me seconds to find the exact page he was looking for. As I commented on his post with the link(response seen below), I found myself eagerly waiting for his response, his approval of my comment. I needed to redeem myself from what happened at Arqade.

He is yet to respond. Instead, I had a mod and another random person just scold me for giving a link as an answer. That it was not acceptable to just post a link even though the person was looking for a link, instead I am expected to rewrite the information from the link to an entire post just in case that link dies one day. As much as that argument makes sense, I don’t understand why that responsibility falls on me, the person answering rather than the person asking the questions. Mainly I do not see why I should be responsible to make sure HIS post is archivable through my answer.

I also checked out the chatrooms in hopes of finding a place to have some sort of discussion rather than just answering or posing questions, but I was not allowed to participate in any chat rooms due to not having enough points; which I found to be counterproductive as I lost my inclination to be involved on that platform.

One thing that struck me about Stack Exchange in general is that it is not really a place that allows for discussion, something I did not know before using it. The lack of freedom to discuss made me uncomfortable, I constantly felt like if I had half an answer or my answer was wrong then there was no room for me to exist on that platform without being heavily scrutinized.

As much as this experience was valuable, I don’t think I ever want to use Stack Exchange again, people are too mean. (Feel free to try convincing me otherwise.)

Intro Music

Sohail: Hello! And welcome! You are listening to Nightly Neanderthal – If you’re tuning in now.. Before the break, Lateefa and I were discussing how the hunting and gathering routes are getting obstructed by rainfall.

Lateefa: Yeah it’s crazy. By the way, I’m loving your new sweater! Is that from the new mammoth fur collection?

Sohail: Yeah, you know what they’ve been saying about this global cooling thing. I guess I better get a headstart.

Lateefa: This ice-age stuff sounds scary man, at least you’ll be chic going through it.

Sohail: Also, about this whole ice-age thing, we’ve got a special guest for you all tonight who says he’s actually discovered a solution. Hear this, he says he can recreate fire. I know what you all may be thinking, I’m thinking it too. We thought of giving him a platform to give him a chance to speak about his invention.

Let’s go to our nightly news correspondent Yero who’s live with OGGOG, the alleged inventor.

Yero: Good morning, listeners. So as I am approaching the scene, and there is a funny smell near the cave. So, we are here on site with our man, Oggog, who claims to have recreated something revolutionary, something that will change the course of humankind. Hi Oggog, and thank you for letting me join you in your cave.

Adam: I am very pleased to meet you. This is a very exciting day for all humans around the Neander Valley.

Yero: Oggog, can you tell us more about what you just discovered? What were you doing?

Adam: So I was hunting for meat, and then I hit two stones and created a spark. I was thinking to myself, what if I started putting these sun sparks over chunks of wood. And then, believe it or not, the fire started.

Yero: Could you try to recreate it for us?

Adam: That’s definitely something that I’m looking into right now. I can show you how it’s done *Begins hitting two rocks together*

Yero: Hmm, okay, you can stop now.. What are your hopes with this fire thing?

Adam: I really want to spread it. I want to bring fires to all caves in the Neanderthal-Valley. No ones gonna do it unless I do it. It’s going to make people happy, and the gods will be pleased.

Sohail (Interrupting): Wait, wait, Yero – If I may – So far Oggog, you’ve made a lot of claims but you haven’t been able to show us anything tangible.

Adam: Here in our Neandert-Valley, I am here breaking my back, busting my ass off to try and advance my species.

Sohail: *Continues arguing*

Lateefa: Hey hey, guys  – Apologies for the behavior of my partner, let’s keep this civil.

Sohail: Shut him off Thank you Bye bye

Sohail: Thank you Yero. Sorry to all our listeners who had to listen to that. So Lateefa, that was something huh?

Lateefa: Yeah, just a shame it had to end like that. I mean, if he’s created what he claims to have, I really think this is the start of something new. I mean, you won’t be wearing your amazing coat.

Sohail: You’re too flattering.

Lateefa: But real talk though, I’ve heard some crazy ideas in the Neanderthal community on mixing fire with food, which has been really difficult to do with current technology.

Sohail: I can’t wait to see what comes out of this,  just imagine – global cooling will be a thing of the past.

* Long Pause *

Well! That’s our time tonight! Join us tomorrow night for more of the same fun.

Outro music

As the UAE has grown rapidly over the past years, a lot of the sources on history and culture can be obtained from people directly. For our first essay assignment, I decided to ask my Mom for clarifications on two topics to help with my writing:

The first one being about the poetry scene in the UAE, long before the UAE became a country one of the most prevalent events within our culture revolved around poetry. According to my Mom, most people from around a hundred years ago to 60-ish years ago were illiterate and their main means of communicating poetry was through memorization. Everyone had a duty bestowed upon them to remember each other’s words and to pass the poems on. I’m hoping to examine the pros and cons of relying on verbal communication within the UAE and how the lack of inscription and the reliance on community relates to our culture.  There is much more to examine within this topic and I’m merely scratching the surface but I’m hoping it will all make sense when I draft the first paper.

As for the second topic, it was common for people that lived on islands to rely on a person as a messenger. Due to everyone being illiterate, they relied on the messengers to carry their messages verbally across to the other islands. This topic is somewhat similar to my previous one as it touches on the aspect of communities and cultures that form and stay together due to their forms of communication. Furthermore, another way of communicating to other islands which were closer and visible was hanging pieces of cloth as a flag that would indicate that the islanders needed something. The receivers of the message would then send someone, a messenger, over to examine the situation and see what they needed and then rallying the message back.

I think both of my topics touch on the same concepts revolving around communities forming over verbal communication due to the lack of literacy. I also find it somewhat ironic that the source I am relying on was verbally communicated to me through my Mom and her experience.

Before I started my assignment I drafted what I wanted to create mentally, I had a lot of random emoji’s I could’ve made but I kept them at the back of my head. As I listened to the podcast the importance of emojis dawned on me, hearing the experience of the young girl that petitioned for a hijab emoji really made me realize that there’s kind of something bigger behind emoji and their representation. Personally I couldn’t care less for emoji’s as I practically never use them unless I was using them ironically or if the emoji was considered a meme.

Going off of that, having to choose what emoji’s could represent me or my culture I was a little conflicted because although I’m Emirati I still consider the internet to be a big part of who I am. So I chose to dedicate one of my 3 emoji’s to the internet. I basically made an Arabic version of the ?️ emoji as the emoji is considered to be a meme. As for my other two emoji’s I chose to go for a Lugaimat emoji and a Red Chai emoji.

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Part of being an Arab and an Emirati is the excess consumption of red chai, paired with the Lugaimat emoji it represents the hospitality of Arabs. Initially I checked to see if there was an emoji for tea, and there was tea/coffee in a mug and also Japanese matcha. Referring back to the 99% Invisible podcast and the importance of representation especially in something as simple as emoji’s, I realized that there’s a lack of representation for things that are “Arab”, a simple example being tea. One could argue that the tea mug emoji represents tea already but that would ignore the cultures where tea is only consumed in small glasses. That glass in itself is a form of representation that could be overlooked, much like the farmer with the pitchfork emoji.

Moving forward :

What irked me about this assignment was knowing that the format of our “emoji’s” automatically makes them not emoji’s, as they are images/pictures that are a file and not part of a text. So if I were to send a message without the context of “this is what a chai emoji would look like” , then it looks like I just sent an illustration. With that being said, I ended up having to give context to most of my recipients which to me did not flow naturally.

As for the reactions that I got they were pretty much what I expected, mainly because they’re just emoji and no one really “reacts” to emoji’s. Below are screenshots of some of the conversations I had, My favorite emoji was the Arabic “B” because it looked the most like an emoji in terms of design and it made a couple of my friends laugh. As for the Lugaimat emoji, it pretty much looks like a round candied apple and without the context of the assignment people probably would not have been able to figure it out. One of my goals when I made these emoji’s was to maintain the emoji aesthetic so it feels more like one. I think that the Chai emoji looked the most like an emoji in terms of design and could probably pass as one if it was used in a text and not as an image. One of the reactions I got for the Chai emoji ties back to the 99%  podcast and representation, seeing someone who has not been to family gatherings remember how much they miss drinking tea with their family just shows how something as simple as tea is deeper than what we take at face value, much like emoji.

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When we first got this assignment, I was not too worried about putting down everything for 8 hours as I have done that before. The only difference being consciously choosing to put down everything for 8 hours versus subconsciously putting everything down because you do not need it. During this summer I have taken countless hours without using any digital devices because I was either too busy drawing/painting or reading for hours on end, but again, I did not prepare for any of that and it just happened. However, with our assignment I must admit that I felt a little stressed knowing that I’m going to do this on purpose and when I did, it felt so much like fasting during Ramadan. Just eagerly waiting for time to be up so you can go back to doing what you usually do.

Furthermore, I chose not to prepare anything the day ahead to fill my time like preparing readings as I still had the rest of the weekend to do them later and I wanted to do this assignment with the least amount of preparation to have a more realistic experience rather than feeling like I am preparing to avoid the inevitable. With that in mind, my entire 8-hours were filled with catching up reading comics/visual novels that I have had for too long alongside other books as well. I also did a lot of cooking, mainly out of boredom but also necessity. Since I was not staying on campus for the weekend I was not able to go to the dining hall for the assignment and ended up spending most if not all my time alone.

Some of the struggles that I had, although minimal, were figuring out how to tell time. As I realized after starting that I always look at my phone to tell time. All the watches that I had were dead and I had to go scavenging for a clock somewhere in my house. I also tend to tweet a lot about what I’m doing/the media I am consuming. So, considering that a lot of what I was doing was reading comics, some for the first time, I had no outlet for my thoughts or opinions. Although technically I do have pen and paper, but it is not the same as knowing you have an audience you would connect more with, or just share different thoughts and opinions with. Even the format in which I wrote my journal entries were like I had a character limit.

This has been a question that has bothered me for a while after our last class ended, and my response to it would probably be too tech-centric. There are a lot of factors that determine what would be considered as communication like context and who the intended recipients were, etc. For now, let’s say that communication for me is the reception of a message by a party, whether intentional or not. As long as there is something to be inferred, then there is some sort of communication being made.

As I read through James Gleick’s The Information, he talks about the concept of tones being part of a language and how saying things in different tones could mean entirely different sentences. This made me think about our move as a whole society to begin using Emoji’s, in a sense they also are some sort of tonality that can now be understood differently according to the context or who the sender and recipients are.

Even with Emoji’s or Emoticons (Emotion Icons) there is a story to be retraced to define where we are now. Speaking from my own point of view, growing up with the internet understanding emoticons felt natural, much like how we speak our native languages easily. Being able to immediately understand that “:)” was a smiley face or “:(“was a sad face and not a typo of a colon and a bracket. While as someone like my Mother on the other was not able to conceive that these symbols we combine are a way to communicate emotion.

As we move forward, emoticons begin getting integrated within websites, forums, and Instant Messaging (MSN, AOL). These text symbols now start to automatically transform to a more basic version of what we now call Emoji’s upon entering them within a text box. This sort of “translation” of text into images makes understanding the emotion meant to be conveyed in a text easier for people that were inexperienced with internet culture.

Going even beyond just the basic text emoticons like “:)” and “:(“, we now have Kaomoji which are the equivalent of text emoticons using Japanese characters. These are much more complex looking characters that convey very different emotions. “ヽ(・∀・)ﾉ” This being an example of a happy expression and “( ; ω ; )”  expressing sadness. Even then unlike the English text emoticons, the Japanese have a larger variety of emoticons.

An example being merely looking at the happiness emoticons, in English text we would have around 5 different variations to express happiness while on the other hand, through Kaomoji there are at least 20 different ways of expressing happiness.

As we begin developing an understanding for emoticons, the concept of social media and smart phones starts booming which causes the creation of the Emoji keyboard, and with it, the replacement of the word Emoticon. Although Emoji offers a keyboard with a much more varied list of emoticons, and is understood by everyone regardless of their age, gender, ethnicity, etc. However, one of the main things about emoticons was that they distinguished internet users and their culture from those who were not heavily involved with it. The release of Emoji’s gave everyone the power to be able to express their emotions through text but even then the context of Emoji has become an important aspect to consider when texting.

For example, a lot of Emoji’s have been claimed to be used as memes or as a reference to something else. One needs to know their audience or recipient before sending a flood of Emoji’s because of the context of the conversation. A person using the laughing and crying emoji through text can be understood in different ways, an example would be me sending that Emoji to my Mom (Not a frequent internet user) would be taken at face value for what it is. Expressing Laughter. However, if I send the same emoji to a friend who I know would understand my use of irony through that emoji, then my message is different.

I find it to be amusing how the internet along with it’s forms of communication are ever evolving, and how the understanding of things comes naturally to one’s who frequently use the internet versus those who casually use it.