It has never been easier to interact, share, and edit content for the electronic screen medium. Today we have smartphones where we can easily download applications that allow us to edit pictures we take and add text or superimpose drawings and emojis. With a simple tap we can also share them with our friends. This has not always been the case, as in the past the bandwidth of communication relied on our paper and pen technologies, which made it considerably harder to copy and share. This medium has opened up new ways of communication that do not rely exclusively on the spoken or written word.

These new ways of communication use visual marks to build up scenes and ideas in people's minds and are even faster at delivering understanding than phonetic writing for some things, making research in this topic very impactful. The ease with which pictures communicate scientific concepts has always mesmerized me and makes me wonder if it could have been possible to develop a more direct visual language rather than an auditory speech-based language.

In my attempts to build this visual convention for scientific explanations I obtained greater insight into a better way to develop this convention, as the tools I found useful to build this also make up internet memes. In this essay I'm going to show my exploration in understanding visual language and show how the visual metaphor is present in current forms of visual communication (internet memes) and that a platform with ease of sharing and exposure guided by the right intention is the key to developing any kind of visual language.

I tried to think of the different initial conditions which would have developed visual language not tied to speech and ended up coming up with the next thought experiment. Imagine you can't talk but are able to think. You communicate through snapshots and video polaroids of your mind's eye. You basically think of an image or video, and on your command, a paper with it comes out from the back of your head instantly. You then show this paper to another person and they reply back with another picture. You continue like this for a while and have a stack of polaroids of the conversation. What kind of convention would develop? Would people reuse their previous visualizations of things?

After thinking about this for some time I figured out that internet memes are not too far from the conventions that could be developed. Memes have found convention as in the image macro but are tainted by a different intention or selective pressure to just general communication. Memes usually are made with the intent to make us laugh, destress, connect emotionally and avoid reality at times. The image macro appeared as convention as it was easy to make. It involves text at the top and bottom, and an image. This image acts as a visual metaphor as it triggers a site of interpretation that places the reader in the scene or frame of mind to understand the text. These visual metaphors can sometimes be too complex to describe in language and would lose all meaning if read as only text.

A useful way to break down the image macro is by using George Lakoff's image schemas. I will first explain image schemas and show examples of them, and then I will use the schemas to analyze the image macro and other internet memes. In 2000, Thomas Sebeok and Marcel Danesi developed this concept inside a semiotic framework and called it metaform.

“A metaform is an example of a connective form that results when abstract concepts are represented in terms of concrete ones. The formula [thinking = seeing], for example, is a metaform because it delivers the abstract concept of [thinking] in terms of the signifieds associated with the concrete concept of [seeing].”

(The Forms of Meaning, 2000)

The following sentences show example uses of the image schema of thinking and seeing.

“I can't quite visualize what that new idea is all about.”

“I view that idea differently from you.”

View and think are not implied to be synonyms but things that work in a similar way. Seeing something is more concrete than thinking and it is used to express the act of thinking, which is more abstract in nature.

Another example is the impediment image schema which is shown in the picture.

The following sentences show example uses of the image schema.

“With lots of determination, we got through that difficult time.”

“The rain stopped us from enjoying our picnic.”

The idea of an impediment as a barrier is used to describe and understand the difficult time, just as the rain in the second sentence. This shows the core structure of the mental model behind the sentences when uttered by an individual. This is also a simple image schema which has found its way into language through the use of the preposition through, but we can easily imagine more complex image schemas that can't be as succinctly described by language devices as they have to build a more complex scene. Here is where some internet memes shine.

Internet memes usually follow the image macro but that is not the rule; some use more complex forms of showing text in the image. One example of an image macro is the socially awesome awkward penguin, which follows a structure of a really successful situation contrasted with a really awkward or misfortunate follow-up. The image schema shows the success and the regress of the situations in question, the going forward and turning around.

Another example is the distracted boyfriend meme, which shows an image schema of contrasting choices, one more impulsive or desired than the other and an apparent backlash from the one you don't choose, as you were not supposed to look or want that. The previous description is not ideal because it uses too many words to explain and still fails to capture the scene, whereas the image shows it immediately. Again the meme's visual metaphor shows something that is hard to explain with words and that people would not usually bother to explain or communicate to other people, but do in a meme format.

In the case of the second picture the meme is modified to show how “the boys” look at “a cold one” (beer) the same way “me” does, not only parodying the meme but enriching it. New things are implied in the parody as it implies that no one is telling “me” not to go after the beer but that “the boys” encourage it.

I stop to wonder if the kind of communication I described in the thought experiment would develop a convention similar to the one in internet memes. I believe something very similar would have developed. The difference would not be super striking as I still think a form of metaphor or image schema would have been found for many situations in daily communication. One can even imagine a really old visual metaphor surviving a long time, where its use originated in an old context but the meaning behind it survived to a context where that does not happen anymore. If we imagine, for example, a danger metaphor to be a tiger picture looking at an interchangeable subject as a visual metaphor, this metaphor is not as applicable in today's society as people do not live in the wild anymore, but it could indeed survive.

The intention behind internet memes is very different though, and it matters as it biases the metaphors that have been selected to survive in the culture. The intention behind meme creation is usually to destress and to make others laugh, so it has not and probably won't develop into general communication unless people intentionally try. A good experiment would be to only communicate with memes for a week and see what kind of convention develops in a general communication scenario.

Having understood how these systems in a way organically develop, I figure that the way to properly develop visual convention for scientific explanations is to develop a context where it is the culture of practice. The circumstance that ends up selecting for ways of communication is ease of distribution. I can repeat a word I read or heard someone else say, but can I as easily share and copy mind images? What's needed is an environment that selects for these in the context of visual explanations. It is hard to know what kind of convention is best, so I see that as the best avenue to develop it. I then look at other places that develop a culture of practice related to scientific explanations, and they lack the critical aspect of ease of sharing and feedback. Textbook visuals and scientific articles share this problem. They are not labile or easily updatable, which removes the ease of sharing as the average person does not own a publisher and cannot share their take on a visual explanation.

Visuals succeed in science when they show structure, as in the case of chemistry. Elizabeth Boone, in her chapter Beyond Writing, writes that “The great variety of notations and models in chemistry arose because each one was designed to capture a particular aspect of a molecule under study; each model therefore suits some purposes better than others.” There are a wide array of purposes when it comes to scientific research, but when it comes to understanding concepts like chains of events, they shine when visualized. The need for accuracy in these scientific explanations might sway a lot of the possible metaphoric language out of these visuals. This still does not mean they would not work, it just means the right metaphors could be harder to find. Current examples of visual language still suggest that it is incredibly important and crucial as it provides the edge meaning not easily communicated through natural language.

The gathered insights show that writing system convention is not something that can be easily foreseen or arbitrarily decided, as it depends a lot on the characteristics of the medium in which the writing system is used. Things that do not work simply stop being shared, and this is key as the creativity and nuanced intention of individuals in each attempt to communicate might survive, eventually becoming convention. This shows the great complex adaptive system that writing is. There is greater insight here, where nature does not over-engineer living things, but slowly and organically selects them and in a co-adaptive dance produces a plethora of living organisms. It is the same with writing systems. They should not be enforced but encouraged to adapt, to come into being, by our human intention as selection.