The Yours, Briefly Edition

On emojis, phone calls, and how little we say to each other now.

Emanuel Derman (ED) started off with WITI with the excellent Japan edition. He grew up in Cape Town, South Africa, and came to Columbia University in New York to study for a PhD in physics. His memoir of a youth in apartheid South Africa, ‘Brief Hours and Weeks: My Life as a Capetonian’, will be published towards the end of the year.

Emanuel here. I like talk movies in which people converse, reveal themselves, debate life, and interact, like Louis Malle’s My Dinner With Andre. I also like conversation with friends more than almost anything. If not talking to a friend in person or in someone’s apartment or in a coffee shop, I am quite happy to talk on the phone to them for hours while lying on the couch or sitting in the park or walking the streets or ensconced in bed. But fewer and fewer of the people I know like talking anymore. And I too choose to do it less often than I used to, sometimes perforce and sometimes by choice.

Increasingly, my interactions with friends consists of texts. Audible conversations, in person or telephonically, are rare and brief. They, and sometimes even I, now prefer limited circumscribed engagement. Everyone is busy, sometimes with nothing or with their own chores or obsessions they want to get back to.

Why is this interesting?

Conversation, even text conversation, keeps contracting. It migrates to whatever medium allows the briefest interaction. The person who wants the briefest communication determines the medium. If you want to talk and they want to text, it’s text that wins. Brevity is power. And power allows brevity.

Long ago, phone calls replaced in-person get-togethers between friends. That was unambiguously good; it allowed for talking to people too far away to easily meet. As Freud wrote in Civilization and Its Discontents, “If there had been no railway to conquer distance, my child would never have left town and I should need no telephone to hear his voice.” Then emails replaced phone calls, and there was something positive about the possibilities they provided. Next, email gave way to texting, limited initially by the constraint on the number of characters (160) and the difficulty of coding them on a flip phone keypad. They filled a gap, were faster than email, and good for a quick alert, a question, or making an arrangement.

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But people texting nowadays have an insatiable urge to be brief that is theoretically unnecessary with a full keyboard. Maybe it’s because most people are distractedly multitasking, sending texts to one person while eating dinner with someone else or watching a streamed show. Instead of texting ok some people I know (and disapprove of) text k which is curt, kind of I can’t be bothered to type an extra o for you and please don’t reply. I thought I might be overthinking this negative view of k but the internet confirms it. And conversely, kkk offensively means irritation: duh, I get it stupid, stop already.

Then came emojis. I didn’t like emojis at first but over the years I’ve gotten used to them. The truth is that they’re convenient, canned phrases when you want to say something or reply without thinking too much. They’re conversation substitutes.

GIFs too are conversation shorteners, but the vast choice does provide some amusement beyond the finite number of stale emojis. They are like the books of jokes that public speakers used, years ago, before the internet, to liven up their speeches. As with LLMs, the skill is in the prompting, not the creation.

Finally, there are tapbacks:

People use this very small set not to shorten conversations, but to terminate them. When you don’t want to say any more, but want to be polite, you tapback on the previous reply. It’s kind of over and out. It looks needy or persistent to reply to a tapback.

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P.S. The emoji I hate the most is 😂 . A fake forced laugh, so vulgar. I find the smiley face 😊 inoffensive, but I still prefer the punctuated smile :-) which is modest and modestly executed.

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Thanks for reading,

Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Emanuel (ED)

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Why is this interesting? is a daily email from Noah Brier & Colin Nagy (and friends!) with editing help from Louis Cheslaw about interesting things. If you’ve enjoyed this edition, please consider forwarding it to a friend. If you’re reading it for the first time, consider subscribing.