In defence of the emoji: How they are helping us to communicate better than ever

It's easy to dismiss emojis as vacuous – but are they doing something that words alone can't?

It’s too easy to dismiss emojis as the death of language, and the first sign that humans are destined
to become a group of mindless drones addicted to their smartphones and unable to express
themselves without the aid of a few dozen yellow faces. Let’s be real: emojis aren’t the precursor to
the four horseman of the apocalypse. Of course, many people think that young people will no longer
be able to read or write in a handful of years followed.

However, experts agree that these clusters of pixels can be an incredibly powerful tool for
expressing ourselves more profoundly than we can with words alone. Emojis – or emoji to give
them the correct plural term – can be seen as metalanguage signals and emotional framing – or, put
more simply, as a means to discuss language and convey our feelings. Essentially, when we
message online we are communicating in a way that we usually would when in face-to-face
interactions, hence why the crying laughter face has so much meaning. The yellow characters rather
than the faces made using semicolons and brackets – were invented in 1998 and were standardised
and added to Apple’s iOS and Mac in 2010. By 2015, the Oxford English Dictionaries named the
smiley face weeping tears of laughter the word of the year.

“They’re a quick and concise way of adding a layer of emotional character to casual, text-based
conversation. And it’s this that has propelled their global popularity. There are currently about
2,000 emoji. The most frequently used are the facial expressions, along with symbols such as the
heart,” Dr Daria J Kuss, course leader of MSc Cyberpsychology at Nottingham Trent University,
adds. They also temper the bluntness of our words similarly to shrug or a wink.

As emojis are an extension of speech at a time when we inseparable from our smartphones, the
colourful characters are also used to express our identities and as a form of creative play, adds Dr
Philip Seargeant, senior lecturer in applied linguistics at the Open University.

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