Four years ago, emojis were my best friend. I found a way to incorporate them into every Instagram caption, and 3/5 of my text messages definitely included some kind of emoji, whether it be the dying of laughter one (although, it really wasn’t tears-streaming down your face that funny), the thumbs up (all good to go!), or the heart-eyed emoji (gushing over our high school crushes via iMessage was indeed a pastime).
Now, I’ve mostly stopped using emojis. Instead, I’m focusing on punctuation and the capitalization of letters to express my emotions in a form of communication that at times is hard to decipher. Like how they did “back then.” (2011: The pre-emoji era in the U.S. Wow so long ago!)
As someone who just turned 20 — closer and closer to adulthood as we speak — I believe we all need to focus on communicating with words. Maybe it’s about maturity. Learning how to actually express ourselves with words and not tiny, brightly-colored cartoon images. Maybe it’s just me growing up. Like losing one’s affection with stuffed animals, maybe I’m just outgrowing emojis.
Or maybe it’s the writer and reader in me who believes that by choosing to depict ourselves with emojis, we are degrading the human language which has already been so belittled with texting lingos and shortened EVERYTHING. (Seriously, no one cares about details anymore. They want short, get-to-the-point summaries. Everyone’s on a time crunch.)
And maybe that’s why we choose emojis: because it’s faster to click on a sad, tears-streaming-down your face icon instead of articulating and explaining our sadness.
And that’s where the problem arises. Emojis do not always accurately represent human emotion. Sometimes, they create a blurriness — leading to misunderstandings and confusion — in our messages. We choose an emoji that kinda, sorta represents a little bit of how we feel.
Winking faces are the worst. So many mixed signals. Like if a boy sends me a winking face, does it mean he’s flirting with me? Or is he just being friendly? Am I really that funny because my friend just sent me five tears-streaming-down his face emojis? Does she love me more today because she sent three different colored heart emojis vs. yesterday when I didn’t even get an emoji in the text?
Once, my guy friend told me that if someone’s using a lot of emojis to communicate it’s a good sign. I also know some people who use emojis to lighten the tone of their messages. And yet that’s another problem: emojis mean something different to everybody. We use and thus interpret emojis differently than everyone else. There are no universal guidelines for emojis, which is what leads to this haziness in communication.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but when it comes to emojis, I argue that they’re worth too many words. Emojis lead to more questions than answers. Questions that could easily be answered if we utilized our abilities to communicate with what makes us human: to read, write, and express ourselves with words, language! The power of written language is beautifully infinite, more than any emoji or all the emojis combined. Let’s not forget that.
