In this text, there are multiple topics that I feel the author addresses and ties in nicely with the evolution of universality. I will not address all of them as that would make this blog longer than it is already going to be.
- Firstly, the author starts with an introduction to pictograms and how these evolved into our current writing system. I believe it is important to note that pictograms, while not always the most practical thing, can be universal. They just need to be used differently than the author interprets. The book
Common images used in emojis. was published in 2012 (Deutsch), and so since then emojis have become popular. While they might not always be used to express complex ideas, there is some value to these objects. Windows even had their own style of emojis before they became mainstream and these were known as Wingdings. (Vox 2015) Throughout the reading of the pictograms evolving, all I could think of were Wingdings and emojis and how people have come full circle, back to using a type of pictogram.
- Towards the end of the reading, he builds on how computers had to move into digital, as analogue would never have reached universality. This section
served to denote the discrepancies between analogue and digital which were two words I have always heard but never known the distinction between. Not only that, but I gained insight on the origin of computers as well.
Overall, there is the uniting theme of universality and its implantation throughout various topics, and I quite enjoyed how he tied together the history/evolution of scripts, numerals, computers, and genetics. He took what I thought were random topics and explored a new facet of them.
Sources:
Deutsch, David. The beginning of infinity: explanations that transform the world. Penguin Books, 2012, intro.nyuad.im/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Untitled-4.pdf.
Edwards, Phil. “Why the Wingdings font exists.” Vox, Vox, 25 Aug. 2015, www.vox.com/2015/8/25/9200801/wingdings-font-history.