Have you ever used an emoji while texting? Anyone who possesses an iPhone or Android knows that emojis are one of the best parts about having a smartphone. In case you're unfamiliar with what an emoji is, an emoji can either be a human face, an animal or an object of some sort.
They are mostly used to describe how you feel over text message. The most common emoji that I use is the face of the person crying tears of joy. Every time that I find something to be funny or highly amusing, that's my go to emoji.
It’s sometimes hard to express feelings by text message, and here’s why: When texting someone, you never know what their emotion may actually be. You could be texting someone, and they could use a tears of joy face, but behind the screen, they could be crying tears of sadness. It's so easy to determine a person’s expression over text when they either become short or abbreviate words that they normally spell out.
However, it's impossible to fully determine a person’s expression when they use their usual emojis, yet have the complete opposite expression in person. They may use normal emojis as a way to suppress their sadness. They may also use happy emojis so that they'll feel like they won't be a bother to anyone that can distinguish the absence or lack of smiley emojis.
And that’s part of the communication problem our society has today. It’s small things like that which are creating a deeper rift between all of us. I mean, what happened to saying what you really felt?
Adapting our thoughts so as to not offend people has become such a source of uneasiness for some people and, while there’s a time and place for sugarcoating, casual text conversations are not one of them.
I think the thing is, it’s so easy to hide behind the screen and lie about how you feel through a simple emoticon; your recipient would never know you were lying. But why? It’s a text message for Christ’s sake!
There’s so much pressure put on tech conversations rather than face to face ones when in reality, they’re not as serious as we acclaim them to be. If you dwell on it long enough, how urgent are crafted gigabytes in a cell phone compared to real, human voice?
Taking shelter behind something as meaningless as an emoji is ridiculous. Take a stand and just say what you feel whether that means not including those four laughing faces at the end of something that isn’t that funny or an all caps "LMFAO."
