The Barcode project
In the seventies, mankind has made another important step toward improving shopping services. As we are coming into the age of convenience, we have invented barcodes, a language developed by humans, but read only by machines. In this series of lines of varying width it is possible to encrypt even very complex information. It is an excellent identifier of goods; therefore we can expect further expansion of its use. Barcodes have created advanced consumer culture. Barcodes can have also important marketing purposes; they can find the right consumer. It is a time when Big Brother is grocery shopping with us.
"To encourage consumers to switch from another cookie brand to, say, Nabisco's Chips Ahoy, Catalina's system spits out a discount coupon for Chips Ahoy each time the scanner reads the barcode for rival brand" 1.
A little intimidated, I was watching the process of barcoding, at these attempts to create a utilitarian society. This language is entirely synthetic; it has nothing to do with the organic nature of languages as they are evolved over the centuries. Later on, I was barcoded myself; I received my own personal code from a local library. I realized some of the hidden consequences of this identifier and the automatizer. The little code said everything about me, for me, in the next visit to the library; it speaks for millions of costumers all over the world. It makes shopping and services faster, and it limits spoken communication. Despite this degraded communication, I found my code very personal. Billions and billions of barcodes are in use; all of them look quite the same, but each of them keeps its own characteristic (the encoded information).
I prepared a list of my most commonly used products, and each of the 26 items represents one letter of the roman alphabet. I developed a barcode font that is my personal barcode language. The structure of the language itself is rather crude; prepositions and articles are missing. However, the barcodes have a potential to become an independent language, equal t o any other language. When one would type a letter with this font, he would actually create a shopping list as it is read by an optical scanner in a shop, with a total price of the products (letters). With a help of the list of codes, he can also read letters in a classical way.
I have saved my barcodes under upper case keys. I have reserved the lower case set for user's personal code (his own language).
1. Business Week, March 29, 1993, p.60