Literacy Neutral Social Network

It is a very common theme in my life to invent something that has already been invented. I assume that most people out there know this feeling. Regardless I experience this on a weekly basis and this is a story about just one more of those times. I had the brilliant idea for a literacy neutral social network. I seem to recall that the idea came to me as I was reading about the general state of affairs in major third world countries around the globe. I don’t usually read about the political and economic state of various countries; however, I was looking for inspiration. I wanted ideas of something to build that could help work towards the solution of a larger problem. I figured that attempting to read a few generalist news and editorial pieces about countries in Africa, South America and South East Asia might give me some inspiration.

I had been looking for inspiration as I’ve always been fascinated by the fact that most apps and software are designed by twenty something white guys based out of California. How can that possibly represent the world of problems they repeatedly say they are solving? How many times have you heard a young guy with a start up saying they are changing the world? Would that not instead mostly solve the problems for 20 something white guys who live in California? I guess we should be happy they are trying...

The second most fascinating thing to me is focusing on the speed of development. It is often commented on how fast we are developing systems and technologies, Moore’s Law and all that. The neat thing about older technology is that it was around for so much longer than new technology. Before older technology would get surpassed it had the opportunity to be explored for alternative uses. Look at mobile technology. We haven’t exhausted everything we can do with SMS let alone using the full extent of the powerful smart phones we all carry around today. Could this be a lost opportunity to explore older technologies?

I had an inkling that if we could look at parts of the world that were behind in technological use then we could almost develop for problems looking back into a technology past. So taking a continent such as Africa which at the time I was looking was mainly a feature phone using population. The challenge could then be the leveraging of feature phones to achieve more than we had the ability of in the west when they came through 15 to 20 years previously.

So I was reading that Africa being led by Nigeria and South Africa were huge consumers of feature phones and were year on year moving towards the adoption of smart devices. But the literacy rate of the population was particularly low. I was reading figures such as a literacy rate in sub-Saharan Africa being lest than 50%, but this situation is improving and was measured to be 65% in 2017: https://www.dandc.eu/en/article/literacy-rates-have-risen-sub-saharan-africa-reality-probably-worse-official-numbers-suggest

But I thought that seemed at odds with a population using devices that I thought, perhaps naively, required literacy to engage with. I remember running across this article and learning about coping mechanisms and how this process could actually work: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/266595198_Text_is_not_the_enemy_How_illiterates%27_use_their_mobile_phones

So with that in hand I had a situation in Africa where there was a heavy reliance on mobile devices incredibly reliant on feature phones and moving towards smart devices in a population that was substantially illiterate, but also improving.

In the west we were still getting excited about social networks. We had lived through My Space, and Bebo and Facebook and Twitter were starting to dominate in the early 2010s. What if we could bring a version of this social networking experience to illiterate sections of the globe or not just illiterate but places where multiple languages could chat back and forth because both parties didn’t need to understand the same language? So now Nigeria and Africa was a starting point that saw inroads into India, rural China South and Central America. These places were all having these same set of circumstances pop up. So I created a literacy neutral social media app called: 😃💬😃 Get it, it didn’t use language, but emoji to communicate.

In simple terms what I envisioned was essentially a messaging app, kind of a MSN messenger that used an emoji keyboard to create meaning of a sort and send it to any of a list of contacts. You could create and maintain a list of contacts, you could send messages and that was it.

I was halfway through building my first draft of the app when I discovered that yet again I had invented something that was already invented. Incidently it is also how I was introduced to Tom Scott, which was nice. He had already build an emoji messaging system or stumbled through the first phases of building one before I did. I’d encourage you to watch more of him if you’ve never had the pleasure, but you can watch his emoji app story here:

I wasn’t deterred. I kept persevering. I figured I could just make it “more better” and then it would be awesome. I mean even the great Tom Scott (I hope that by plugging him I’ll get to meet him one day) gave up due to the drain that building an app of this nature imposes. And this is were Annalu Waller came into my life and a “more better” idea was suggested.

I have been friends with a fella from the University of Dundee Computer Science department for ages. I say this not to prove that I have friends, but because he introduced me to Annalu. I believe that at the time she was Dean of Computing at the University of Dundee. These days she appears to be not so much a Dean as a professor but she has always focused on human computer interaction. After being introduced I laid out my idea and described what I was building. Now taking a second here I need to tell you a bit about Annalu.

Like many superb educators before she has a talent for telling you that you’re crap and guiding you towards improvement through better ideas all within seconds of hearing about a project. I’m sure she would be nicer in her description of it, but my idea was crap, nobody needs to communicate through emoji they are not expressive enough. “But,” she said. “What about using Blissymbolics?”

And with the help of Annalu a decent idea was formed. Unlike emoji, Blissymbolics is a very expressive pictographic language: https://www.blissymbolics.org/

It was billed to me as a pictorial version of Esparanto. Born out of a desire to help communication between people who wrote and spoke in different languages it was meant to be a truly international visual system.

By this point I had built an emoji keyboard and had the ability to create a user, compose and send messages all using emoji. But now I needed to expand my thinking. I contacted blissymbolics.org and discovered that they were in the process of getting blissymbolics into Unicode and it was only a matter of time. So I put off the immediate transferring of the emoji keyboard to blissymbolics. Looking back it seems like that was a bad move, as it seems that a five or six years later they still have not gotten bliss into Unicode.

But that was the beginning of the end for my effort on the project. I took on a new job and several new projects and this was left waiting in the wings. Worst of all my code was misplaced during one of several operating system upgrades that have happened in the proceeding years.

Regardless of where I ended up there appears to be no current systems in operation at the very least none with blissymbolics. So this might still be a good idea to complete one day. Either by myself or maybe your good self dear reader. Take my folly and make something awesome.