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Jason Kennedy, Senior Lecturer Above the Bar of Animated Performance, Auckland University of Technology

Play, pause, rewind – where do these universal media symbols come from?

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The play symbol is one of the world’s most recognisable icons. Across languages, writing systems, and cultures, a single right-pointing triangle is widely understood as “start”.

Yet there’s nothing about this simple geometric icon that inherently suggests the start of something. So why does it carry this meaning?

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