The Emoticon Generation Read Free Page B

endless Pings! back and forth. I’ve seen a few security videos of some of these schools. It’s like a scene out of Hitchcock’s The Birds .
    This is something slightly incomprehensible to us older folks: How can pressing one button, how can sending one icon that says ‘a thousand Pings!’ actually be proof of love? There’s no effort in it. It’s just one character. I wonder, is there something to my sentiments, or am I just being an old doof saying how things were different ‘when I was young’?
    Fox certainly believes that sending it is meaning it. He bought his wife a parrot and taught him to say exactly one word: “Ping!” His wife works from home and Fox works from the office. But still, when he’s not there, she hears it all the time: “Ping!” “Ping!” “Ping!”
    Okay, so the Ping! was popular. But how pervasive is it? Ask Hollywood. Released only last week (at the time of writing this) is Patrick Dempsey’s first directorial attempt in 15 years, The Ping Queen , a remake of one of the movies he starred in, back when we were both teenagers: Can’t Buy Me Love . Its plot: An unpopular high-school girl wants to become popular. She teams up with a geek who figures out how to send her Pings! and make it look like she received it from many admirers. The number of Pings! she gets makes her instantly popular in school, able to choose the best jocks to take out to the dance. In the end, she learns how shallow success is and falls in love with the geek.
    The last scene in the movie ends with the two getting closer to each other. “Ping!” he tells her saucily. “Ping,” she returns racily. As the camera moves up, you hear her say, as if in orgasm, “Ping ping ping!” and he returns, in an equally orgasmic tone, “Ping ping ping ping ping!” Credits roll. Movie ends.
    Meanwhile, in TV world, the new season of Jersey Shore is rumored to have a character that refers to his penis as “The Ping Machine”. It’s sleazier than – but not as dirty as – it sounds. His ‘Ping Machine’ generates quite a lot of Pings! (attention, and positive at that,) from the women-folk. Thus it is a Ping!-generating machine.
    The first Ping!-related arrest took place in Chicopee, Massachusetts. A young, 15-year-old kid was so enamored with a girl in class that he began to send her dozens of Pings! to her various email addresses, iPhone, and home computer. When he was told in no uncertain terms that his advances were not welcome, his socially inept mind forced him to continue to send her Pings! without end. First the teachers became involved, then the parents, and then the police. Boys that can’t speak to girls can still send them Pings!
    Anthony Rockwell, the emoticon poet from Blue Diamond, Nevada, has used the Ping! in his poetry. Here is another one of his poems. Again, I will convey the meaning behind the different-colored Pings! rather than use the Pings! themselves.
    AMERICA [Ping!]
By Anthony R
    America [Ping!]
America [Five Pings!]
America [Ten Pings!]
America [A hundred Pings!]
America America America [Infinity Pings!]
    Is this poem sad because America’s illiterate youth thinks it’s good, or is it actually good? Are Anthony’s patriotic feelings any lesser than mine, simply because I can express them in a beautifully-constructed sentence, while all he has to do is press a button on a machine?
    Is this just teenagers being stupid? Or is something greater going on here? Is the inertia permanent, or will it change when the teenagers grow out of it, the same way the sixties’ hippies turned into the eighties’ yuppies?
    Hold your judgment, please. You’ve only heard the first of Fox’s two ‘words’. There’s still another one coming, to finish off the revolution.
    Let us return to the massively quick evolution of the internet world. Remember that Fox does not blink? Someone was faster than him. The teen world is filled with young and keen programmers looking for a new way to bend the rules. A