# Symbolic Communication By:: [[Ross Jackson]] 2025-02-23 George Orwell famously surmised in his 1945 work Animal Farm that, “all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” Likewise, all communication is symbolic, but some communication is more symbolic than others. Communication is symbolic insofar as each letter is a character, and groups of letters comprise phonics, which are aggregated into representations of words, which are used to denote things. In its very rudiments, communication is symbolic. Beyond this, there are emojis, the iconography of symbolic communication. These icons are used to represent ideas and emotions visually. Whereas the emojis used can sometimes be ambiguous, people can frequently decode these nuggets of symbolic communication without difficulty. People “get it” and respond. At its limit, communication is symbolic regarding its ability to capture the ethereal. Through rhetoric, a few can convey the essence of a moment in such a way that it is transformative. Revolution requires rhetoric and action. Increasingly, generative AI can produce strings of words indistinguishable from those produced by humans. AI has progressed to the point that it almost assuredly passes the Turing test. Much of symbolic communication is pattern recognition and conformity to protocol. Computers can accomplish this better and more efficiently than humans. The most crucial aspect of symbolic communication is that it provides a vocabulary to understand one’s thinking and communicate with others. Two fundamental questions persist. Do we care what we think? Do we want to try to understand the thoughts of others? AI might facilitate one attempting to engage in these two aspects of communication, but it will never do so completely. We may still rediscover our shared humanity in the narrowing gap between synthetic and authentic symbolic communication. #### Related Items [[Communication]] [[Rhetoric]] [[Artificial Intelligence]] [[Language]] [[Understanding]]