I was saving something the other day, using the save button, and a couple of things struck me. The first was the symbol itself. The save symbol is an icon of a floppy drive. Put your hand up if you still have a floppy drive in your machine! Even if you do, do you use it as the primary place to save a file? I think not. I imagine this will be with us well in to the generation that has to ask... 'Daddy, what does the little picture on the save button mean?'
The second and slightly more serious point is the use of symbols in language. I can't help feeling that text based languages like English are now heavily accompanied by an enormous library of graphical communication from road signs, to symbols on car dashboards, to computer and equipment icons (somehow we all know that a square on a player of some sort means STOP). Provided we understand what they mean they can be extremely efficient and a multinational method of communication. In fact our communication media are getting increasingly rich, no longer just black and white text on paper but an infrastructure for creating (personal digital cameras, personal CMSs & blogging) delivering (the Internet, Satalite...) and consuming (DVD players, Video iPods...) rich graphical content. I wonder to what extent communication will become increasingly graphically based because of its efficiency and its international nature? I also wonder to what extent cultures used to dealing in graphical communication, such as Chinese and Japanese, will approach this differently?