How Autism Shaped the Modern Conversation
n Facebook, iPhone messenger, and What’s App, conversation is often silent and devoid of body language. Emotions are condensed to icons on a screen: a happy face, a wink, or a kiss blown to a loved one through LTE and pixels. These emoticons (a portmanteau of “emotion” and “icon”) and emojis (everything else from crocodiles to beer), since their introduction on the iPhone in October 2011 and Android early the next year, seem to be everywhere. A recent poll, for example, showed that 38 percent of text messages within the United States contained at
