Iconoclasm

What can be said about the save icon? It is a diskette. It is often blue. And of course, as others have pointed out, many (soon to be most) people using computers today have never touched one and never will.

Yet you could say the same for a the “home” icon (millions will never own a house), the “phone” icon (used a model 500 lately?), the lasso, the magnifying glass, the dodge and burn tools. “Games,” represented by a checkerboard! Copy and paste, for god’s sake?

The simple fact is that there is a shared visual orthography in which some things are acknowledged worldwide, and this overpowers the logical suggestion to constantly update it. Many reading this would, 20 years ago, be unsure whether the icon represented saving or accessing the A: drive. Nowadays, many will never encounter portable storage in their life. Yet the diskette is firmly associated with saving changes, certainly more so than it is with removable media. So logic has nothing to do with it. Language has less to do with logic than it has to do with a shared interpretation of symbols. These symbols are widely used because they are widely understood, and they are widely understood because they are widely used.

The snake will not run out of tail to eat.

The Noun Project is a fun exploration of this concept — that there are, say, 32