By ADAM STERNBERGH
Smile, You’re Speaking
EMOJI
The rapid evolution of a wordless
tongue.
Illustration by Zohar Lazar
~
CONSIDER THE TILDE. There it is, that little squiggle, hanging
out on the far-upper-left-hand side of your -computer
keyboard. The symbol dates back to ancient Greece, though
tilde comes from Spanish, and in modern English it’s used to
indicate “approximately” (e.g., ~30 years) or “equivalence” (x
~ y) in mathematics. And, as of this year, according to a
breakdown of the website emojitracker by Luminoso, a text-analytics company, the tilde was surpassed in usage on
Twitter by the emoji symbol for “joy.” Which looks like this:
.
The Joy emoji—also referred to on the -Emojipedia website
as “Face With Tears of Joy” or “the LOL Emoji” (emoji don’t
have official names, just nicknames created by their users)—
dates back, in North America, to roughly 2011, when Apple
put a readily accessible emoji keyboard in iOS 5 for the
iPhone. Which means that in three short years, Face With
Tears of Joy -vanquished the 3,000-year-old tilde.
And that’s just one emoji. If we count all emoji together—
Smiling Face
Eyes
Winking Face
and Smiling Face With Smiling
and Grinning Face
and
and Smiling Face With Heart-
Shaped Eyes
and Kissing Faceand Kissing Face
With Closed Eyesand Face With Stuck-Out Tongue With
Tightly Closed Eyes, not to mention House With Gardenand
Convenience Storeand Tramand Love Hoteland Ghostand
Money With Wingsand Chart With Upward Trendand
-Hamburger—then emoji, as a group, are now used more
frequently on Twitter than are hyphens or the numeral 5.
All of which is to say: The 3,000-year-old tilde might want to
consider rebranding itself as Invisible Man With Twirled
Mustache.
I
T’S EASY TO DISMISS EMOJI. They are, at first glance,
ridiculous. They are a small invasive cartoon army of faces
and vehicles and flags and food and symbols trying to topple
the millennia-long reign of words. Emoji are intended to
illustrate, or in some cases replace altogether, the words we
send each other digitally, whether in a text message, email,
or tweet. Taken together, emoji look like the electronic
equivalent of those puffy stickers tweens used to ornament
their Trapper Keepers.
And yet, if you have a smartphone, emoji are now available
to you as an optional written language, just like any global
language, such as Arabic and Catalan and Cherokee and
Tamil and Tibetan and English. You’ll find an emoji
keyboard on your iPhone, nestled right between Dutch and
Estonian. The current set is limited to 722 symbols—these
are the ones that have been officially encoded into Unicode,
which is an international programming standard that allows
one operating system to recognize text from another.
(Basically, Unicode is the reason that the text message you
send from your iPhone is legible to someone with an Android
phone and vice versa.) This summer, the Unicode
Consortium—a U.S.-based nonprofit organization with a
Pynchon-ian name that rules over all things Unicode—
announced that more than 250 new emoji symbols would be
added to the existing set. These new emoji range from
obviously useful ones like Cloud With Rain and Dark
Sunglasses to questionably useful ones like Reversed Hand
With Middle Finger Extendedto frankly bizarre ones like
Man in Business Suit Levitating. And this fall, in response to
ongoing concerns about the lack of ethnic diversity among
existing emoji—most of which, if they involve human faces,
are represented as vaguely Caucasian—Unicode announced
that -users should soon have the option to change the skin
tone of certain emoji to different hues on the FitzPatrick
scale, a “recognized standard for dermatology.”
This was very big news to emoji enthusiasts. It should be
pretty big news for you, as well. We are all increasingly
talking to each other through screens. A 2010 Pew report
showed that teenagers text each other more frequently than
they use any other form of communication, including faceto-face conversation, which comes in at No. 3. If you ask a
random person, especially one under 30, what a tilde is, he
will probably stare at you blankly. But he is very likely to
recognize, and comprehend, Face With Tears of Joy.
HOW TO SPEAK EMOJI: THE BASICS
101
A SIMPLE RANGE OF EMOTIONS. THERE ARE MANY WAYS TO CRY
IN EMOJI.
USE THESE LADIES TO AFFIRM YOUR FRIENDSHIP. LIKE BLOOD
BROTHERS, BUT TAP DANCERS.
THESE ARE THE THREE MOST OBVIOUSLY SEXUAL EMOJI. USE
YOUR IMAGINATION.
EMOJI OF PRAISE.
WHAT TO USE IF YOU’RE BORED WITH “OKAY” OR “YES.”
TO CONVEY ENTHUSIASM, DEPLOY EMOJI IN A GAGGLE.
STRATEGIC FINGER-POINTING TO SHOW YOU LIKE WHAT WAS
TYPED ON THE LINE ABOVE.
By Lindsey Weber
IN 2013, IN RESPONSE to the question “Do you use stickers or
emoji in message apps?” 74 percent of people in the U.S. and
82 percent in China responded that they have. (Stickers are a
kind of faux emoji—things like -Seinfeld Emoji or the
­“Peanuts” characters you find on Facebook—that you can
send using certain apps but that aren’t baked into Unicode.)
Over 470 million Joy emoji are being sent back and forth on
Twitter right now—which makes the Joy emoji the No. 1
most popular emoji on Twitter (it tends to compete for the
top spot with the Heart). Lovers have successfully wooed one
another with emoji. Recruiters for ISIS are using emoji in
their friendly sounding, ISIS-promoting tweets. Someone
put together a song-length emoji-translation video of
Beyoncé’s “Drunk in Love,” while someone else translated R.
Kelly’s “Trapped in the Closet” into emoji, while someone
else translated all of Moby-Dick (titled, inevitably, Emoji
Dick). There are no fewer than three emoji-only social
networks currently in development: Emojicate, Emoji.li, and
something called Steven. The website Emojinalysis will track
your recent emoji use to analyze your emotional well-being.
The rapper Drake recently got an honest-to-God tattoo of an
emoji that, depending on whom you ask, means either
“praying hands” or “high five”. (Drake says praying hands. “I
pity the fool who high-fives in 2014,” he clarified via
Instagram.)
This elasticity of meaning is a large part of the appeal and,
perhaps, the genius of emoji. They have proved to be well
suited to the kind of emotional heavy lifting for which
written language is often clumsy or awkward or problematic,
especially when it’s relayed on tiny screens, tapped out in
real time, using our thumbs. These seemingly infantile
cartoons are instantly recognizable, which makes them
understandable even across linguistic barriers. Yet the
implications of emoji—their secret meanings—are constantly
in flux.
Decoding pictures as part of communication has been at the
root of written language since there was such a thing as
written language. “What is virtually certain,” writes Andrew
Robinson in Writing and Script: A Very Short Introduction,
is “that the first written symbols began life as pictures.”
Pictograms—i.e., pictures of actual things, like a drawing of
the sun—were the very first elements of written
communication, found in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and China.
From pictograms, which are literal representations, we
moved to logograms, which are symbols that stand in for a
word ($, for example) and ideograms, which are pictures or
symbols that represent an idea or abstract concept. Modern
examples of ideograms include the person-in-a-wheelchair
symbol that universally communicates accessibility and the
red-hand symbol at a pedestrian crossing that signals not
“red hand” but “stop.”
Emoji can somewhat magically function as pictograms and
ideograms at the same time. The most straightforward
example is the Eggplant emoji. On one level, it looks like an
eggplant and can be used to communicate “eggplant.” On
another level, it looks (kind of) like a penis and can be used
to communicate all manner of lascivious intent, especially
when combined with a peach.As Jenna Wortham, a New
York Times technology reporter, wrote in an essay about
emoji for Womanzine’s emoji issue, they “have become an
ever-evolving cryptographic language that changes
depending on who we are talking to, and when.” In short,
emoji are a secret code language made up of symbols that
everyone already intuitively understands.
“When it comes to text-based communication, we’re babies,”
explains Tyler Schnoebelen, a linguistics Ph.D. from
Stanford who works for Idibon, a text-analytics company. As
he says, we’ve learned to talk, and we’ve learned to write, but
we’re only now learning to write at the speed of talking (i.e.,
text), sending messages over vast expanses, absent any
physical contextual clues. If you are talking to someone faceto-face, you don’t need an additional word or symbol to
express “I’m smiling” because you would, presumably, be
smiling. The psychologist Albert Mehrabian, in an oft-cited
(and occasionally criticized) study, determined in the 1950s
that only 7 percent of communication is verbal (what we
say), while 38 percent is vocal (how we say it) and 55 percent
is nonverbal (what we do and how we look while we’re saying
it). This is well and good for face-to-face communication, but
when we’re texting, 93 percent of our communicative tools
are negated.
Enter emoji.
E
MOJI WERE BORN in a true eureka moment, from the mind of
a single man: Shigetaka Kurita, an employee at the Japanese
telecom company NTT Docomo. Back in the late 1990s, the
company was looking for a way to distinguish its pager
service from its competitors in a very tight market. Kurita hit
on the idea of adding simplistic cartoon images to its
messaging functions as a way to appeal to teens. The first
round of what came to be called emoji—a Japanese
neologism that means, more or less, “picture word”—were
designed by Kurita, using a pencil and paper, as drawings on
a 12-by-12-pixel grid and were inspired by pictorial Japanese
sources, like manga (Japanese comic books) and kanji
-(Japanese characters borrowed from written Chinese).
Kurita wound up with 176 crude symbols ranging from
smiley faces to music notes. This feature proved so popular
that the other Japanese telecoms adopted it. In 2007, Apple
released the first iPhone—and the global smartphone market
boomed. Apple and Google both realized that, in order to
crack the Japanese market, they would need to provide emoji
functions in their operating systems, if only for use in Japan.
So Apple buried an emoji keyboard in the iPhone where
North Americans weren’t intended to find it. But eventually
tech-savvy users in the U.S., who were curious about the
Japanese emoji phenomenon, figured out that you could
force your phone to open this hidden keyboard by
downloading a Japanese--language app, and voilà—suddenly
you could bejangle your texts with a smiling Pile of Poo.
There are a handful of truly confusing emoji to the North
American eye, nearly all of which can be traced to some
Japanese custom or tradition. For example, in Japan, a pile
of poo is considered good luck. Here’s an explanation from
the Japan Times to a reader from Redmond, Washington,
who wrote in after being befuddled by the abundance of
golden poo charms available for sale at the Narita airport:
“The product you saw is called Kin no Unko (The Golden
Poo), a name that plays on the fact that the Japanese word
for poop (unko) starts with the same ‘oon’ sound as a
completely unrelated word that means ‘luck.’ Japanese enjoy
this kind of pun—traditional storytelling is full of them—
which may help explain why more than 2.5 million of the
lucky little loads have sold in the last seven years.” (The
article continues: “Furthermore, there is a long history of
poo-related worship in Japan …”)
“But why is the pile of poo smiling?” would be the next
logical question. Before we answer that, you may want to
buckle yourself in, because we’re about to toboggan down the
Smiling Pile of Poo Emoji Wormhole.
E
VERY SMARTPHONE OPERATING system—Apple, Android,
etc.—has its own rendering of each emoji, including poo.
Android’s pile of poo is surrounded by flies and wavy lines
that suggest a poo-like stinkiness. Apple’s pile of poo has
wide eyes and is smiling. Twitter’s pile of poo also has eyes
but looks kind of surprised, perhaps because it’s only just
realized that it’s a sentient pile of poo with eyes. So if your
pile of poo is smiling, it’s likely because you have an iPhone,
and someone at Apple thought it’d be fun to make the poo
happy.
The programmers behind each operating system are free to
design their emoji as they like. However, the emoji palette—
the collection of 722 standardized emoji that are available for
you to use—has been encoded by the Unicode Consortium,
which was founded in 1990 and consists of a loose network
of contributing members. The people who do work for
-Unicode tend to be computer-programming experts with a
side interest in linguistics—a typical biography: “His hobbies
include Maltese-­language advocacy.” They are, in a way, the
modern analog to the devout monks who sat and diligently
created illuminated manuscripts so that great written works
of theology could be widely shared.
HOW TO SPEAK EMOJI: INTERMEDIATE LEVEL
SPOILER ALERT!
NOBODY PUTS BABY IN THE CORNER
THE PLOT OF SCANDAL
THE KARDASHIAN FAMILY
Emoji presented a new and unique dilemma to Unicode.
“With most text, you don’t have things being invented left,
right, and center,” says Peter Constable, the vice-president of
Unicode. “The letters of English are the letters of English. We
don’t have people inventing new letters of English every
day.” With emoji, however, there are limitless possibilities
for new symbols, and it’s literally impossible to meet the
demand. And so, despite the fact that, as of 2011, you could
text a cartoon pile of poo to any person in the world, people
in the world were not happy. The world wanted an emoji hot
dog! And an emoji avocado! And, understandably,
representations of people of color! But in order to add new
emoji, Unicode would have to invent them, then design
them, then approve them, and then encode them. And
Unicode is not in the business of inventing or designing new
emoji, anymore than it would invent and design new English
letters and add them to the alphabet.
Unicode did decide, however, to encode the 250 new emoji to
be released this summer, which should show up on your
phone as soon as Apple, Google, Microsoft, and other
Unicode signatories add them to their operating systems.
(Apple’s iOS 8, for example, does not have the latest emoji,
and the company has declined to comment on when they
might go live.) None of these “new” emoji are actually new—
instead, the new emoji are all either translations of
preexisting font sets known as Wingdings and Webdings, or
they are fairly boring new symbols, like the ever-useful
Increase Font Size Symbol.
MAN IN A BUSINESS SUIT LEVITATING
There are, though, a few notable additions, such as that Man
in Business Suit Levitating (also referred to as Jumping
emoji or Hovering emoji), which is an excellent example of
how the technologically convoluted path for new emoji leads
to the existence of totally weird and random characters. The
Wingdings font was originally developed way back in 1990
by Microsoft as a way of allowing computer users to
incorporate symbols into their text, including such sexy icons
as an open folderand a mailbox. A subsequent font,
Webdings, was created in 1997 to allow a similar use of
symbols online. In Webdings, an unusual symbol was
included. It is, for lack of a better description, a man in a
business suit levitating.
Internet sleuths, puzzled as to why Microsoft had decided to
include this particular inexplicable symbol, tracked down
one of the original Webdings designers, who explained that
the symbol—which replaces the lowercase m—was intended
as a tribute to the “rude boy” logo for 2 Tone Records, a ska
record label founded by one of the guys from the Specials.
Now, at least as far as your Unicode-reading smartphone is
concerned, Man in Business Suit Levitating is as legitimate a
character as the numeral 5, or the letter A, or the tilde, or
poo. What that man will mean—well, that’s entirely up to
you. This is the fun of emoji. The nail-painting emoji, in
some circles, has come to mean “I’m not bothered” or
“Haters gonna hate.” Man in Business Suit Levitating could
mean “jumping for joy,” or it could mean “mystery.” (Online
speculators have already nicknamed it “the Man in Black
emoji.”) As Wortham explains about her favorite emoji, the
Tempura Shrimp, what she loves about it is precisely the fact
that it can have many different meanings. Sometimes she
uses it to mean a foul or “salty” mood, when she wants to
curl up like a shrimp. With some of her friends, the shrimp
morphed into a joke that stands in for “Mariah Carey.”
(“Something about her complexion and the way she’s always
stuffed into a tube-ish dress,” Wortham writes in her shrimp
essay.) Others use the shrimp as “quirky filler”—a nod, a
wink, an acknowledgment that you’re simply thinking of
someone. Tempura Shrimp emoji, she writes, has become “a
way to be present when there’s nothing else to say at all.”
C
ONSIDER THE EXCLAMATION POINT. For much of its history,
the exclamation point had a fairly simple usage: to
straightforwardly and sincerely indicate excitement or, if
included in a quotation, vehemence or volume. (“Get off my
lawn!” as opposed to “Get off my lawn.”) Yet for a long time,
circa the mid-1990s, it seemed linguistically and socially
im­possible to use an exclamation point unironically. I’ll
anchor this observation to Peter Bagge’s landmark grunge-culture comic Hate!, which debuted in 1990, simply titled
Hate, but which added the telltale exclamation point to its
name at issue No. 16 in 1994. I’ll also add, from personal
recollection, that if you included an exclamatory phrase such
as “I’m so excited!” or “See you tonight!” in any written
electronic correspondence up to, say, 1999, you could
reliably assume it would be read as the punctuational
equivalent of a smirk.
HOW TO SPEAK EMOJI: ADVANCED
(This article, as translated by Emoji Dick author Fred Benenson.)
“Emoji are a small invasive cartoon army of 722 pictographs, trying to
topple the 5000 year long reign of written words.”
“Once you look at emoji you start to see a language that does a lot of things
that are very awkward to using actual words, like say ‘I love you’”
“Emoji is like someone invented a secret code language that everyone
already intuitively understands.”
“If the exclamation mark was the signature punctuational flourish of
Generation X, emoji is the signature generational flourish of the
Millenials.”
That was how my generation came to use the exclamation
point, anyway. More recently, with the advent of new forms
such as tweets and text messaging, the exclamation point has
reverted to something closer to its original meaning. In fact,
it’s more or less switched places with the period, so that “I’m
excited to see you!” now conveys sincere excitement to see
you, while “I’m excited to see you.” seems, on a screen at
least, to imply the opposite. The exclamation point, once so
sprightly and forceful, has come, according to Ben Yagoda in
a piece in the New York Times, to signify “minimally
acceptable enthusiasm.”
All this fluidity means that it’s very hard to keep up—it’s
what the writer Emily Gould described to a friend as the
“arms race of communication styling that led me to feel that
sometimes only one exclamation point seems unenthusiastic
or even downright sarcastic.” She was, in part, explaining her
attraction to emoji—which, she wrote, “make it easier to talk
about anything, I think!”
Her friend Phoebe Connelly had texted her about
engagement rings—a fraught subject. Connelly often
addressed her engagement using emoji: the Heart, the
Diamond, the Diamond Ring, the Wedding Cake, the Party
Starters. (Weirdly, though, not the Bride With Veil, the most
obviously wedding-related emoji, which she avoided for
reasons she can’t quite explain, even to herself.) “Emoji,”
Connelly wrote in an article for the Womanzine special emoji
issue, “allow me an ironic space within the dreaded cheery
sincerity of being engaged. I can emoji diamond rings;
therefore, it is ok that yes, I have a diamond ring. I default to
emoji, a safe argot, as a means of discussing a marriage I’m
emotionally ready for, but still lack the language to describe.”
When I first encountered emoji, I assumed they were used
only ironically—perhaps because, as a member of Generation
X, I am accustomed to irony as a default communicative
mode. And it’s certainly true that emoji have proved popular,
unsurprisingly, with early adopters and techno-fetishists and
people with trend-sensitive antennae—the kinds of people
who might, for example, download a Japanese app to “force”
their iPhone to reveal a hidden emoji keyboard. But emoji
have also proved to be popular with the least -techno-literate
and ironic among us, i.e., our parents. Many people I spoke
to relayed that their moms were the most enthusiastic
adopters of emoji they knew. One woman said that her neardaily text-message-based interaction with her mother
consists almost entirely of strings of emoji hearts. Another
woman, with a septuagenarian mother, revealed to me that
her mom had recently sent a text relaying regret, followed by
a crying-face emoji—and that this was possibly the most
straightforwardly emotional sentiment her mother had ever
expressed to her.
And now we’re getting to the heart of what emoji do well—
what perhaps they do better even than language itself, at
least in the rough-and-tumble world online. Aside from the
widespread difficulty of expressing yourself in real time with
your clumsy thumbs, while hunched over a lit screen, and
probably distracted by 50 other things, there’s the fact that
the internet is mean. The widespread anonymity of the web
has marked its nascent years with a kind of insidious
incivility that we all now accept with resignation. Comment
sections are a write-off. “Troll” is a new and unwelcome
­subspecies of person. Twitter’s a hashtag-strewn battlefield.
But emoji are not, it turns out, well designed to convey
meanness. They are cartoons, first of all. And the emoji that
-exist—while very useful for conveying excitement,
happiness, bemusement, befuddlement, and even love—are
not very good at conveying anger, derision, or hate. If we can
take as a given that millennials, as a generation, were raised
in a digital environment—navigating, for the first time,
digital relationships as an equally legitimate and in some
ways dominant form of interpersonal -interaction—it stands
to reason they might be drawn to a communicative tool that
serves as an antidote to ambient incivility. They might be
especially receptive to, and even excited about, a tool that
counteracts the harshness of life in the online world. They
might be taken with emoji.
The word that came up multiple times, in many
conversations, with many people about emoji was soften.
“The thing it does is soften things,” says Tyler Schnoebelen,
the linguistics expert.
“I use emoji in personal emails all the time, because I feel
like I’m softening the email,” says Vulture’s Lindsey Weber,
who co-curated the “Emoji” art show.
Alice Robb, who is in her 20s, wrote in The New Republic
about saying good-bye to a friend who was moving across the
country via text message. “I texted her an emoji of a crying
face. She replied with an image of a chick with its arms
outstretched. This exchange might have been heartfelt. It
could have been ironic. I’m still not really sure. It’s possible
that this friend and I are particularly emotionally stunted,
but I put at least part of the blame on emoji: They allowed us
to communicate without saying anything, saving us from
spelling out any actual sentiments.” And yet what’s striking
is that her whole story is full of actual sentiment—she is no
doubt sad that her friend is leaving, and her friend is no
doubt sad to be leaving. Adding an emoji to a message
doesn’t undercut those sentiments (as irony would) but
rather says, “I mean this, but it’s hard to say it, and I know
it’s hard, but that makes it no less true.” Emoji’s default
implication isn’t irony; its default is sincerity, but sincerity
that’s self-aware. If the ironic exclamation point was the
signature punctuational flourish of Generation X, the
emoji—that attempt to bridge the difficult gap between what
we feel and what we intend and what we say and what we
text—is the signature punctuational flourish of the
millennials.
“There really are no negative or mean emoji,” says Weber.
“There’s no violent or aggressive emoji. Even the angry faces
are hilarious or silly.” Sure, there’s a pistol emoji. But
imagine sending a death threat using Pistol and Angry Face.
If it’s possible to “soften” a death threat, emoji would do it.
It’s frankly pretty strange that, in an online climate that is
constantly being called out for excessive aggression and
maliciousness, emoji have no in-built linguistic capacity for
meanness. There are angry faces and frowning faces and
thumbs down and even the so-called Face With No Good
Gesture, which, in the Apple set, is a woman with her arms
crossed in an X. But, seriously, look at her:. The Face With
No Good Gesture has never actually hurt someone’s feelings.
One of the many new official emoji being added as part of
Unicode 7 is a raised middle finger—like all the new emoji,
it’s simply being added because it’s part of the Wingdings
font. At first glance, it seems pretty surly, especially for an
emoji. But as an expression of aggression, it’s harmless. If
the worst that online trolls could do was send you an endless
string of raised-middle-finger emoji, I think we’d all agree
that we’d be living in a better world.
C
ONSIDER THE SMILING FACE With Smiling Eyes. Right now,
on Twitter, Smile is being used 157,439,872 times.
Popularity-wise, that ranks it as No. 8. Here are a few other
popular ones: Face Savoring Delicious Food. Disappointed
but Relieved. Man and Woman Holding Hands. Baby. Face
Throwing a Kiss.- Person Raising Both Hands in Celebration.
Okay Hand Sign. Thumbs Up.
In 1974, the American Institute of Graphic Arts, in
conjunction with the U.S. Department of Transportation,
designed a new system of symbols to be used in airports
around the world in response to the increase in global travel.
The 34 symbols it came up with include such undeniably
resilient icons as Man Hailing Taxi, Diapered Baby, and the
Suitcase symbol, which still direct people to taxi stands,
changing tables, and luggage carousels around the world. But
the design committee also made the following deduction:
“We are convinced that the effectiveness of symbols is strictly
limited.” Symbols, they found, could only augment language,
not replace it.
It’s improbable that the Smiling Face With Smiling Eyes is a
permanent addition to our language; a cartoon smiling face
is just about the crudest method possible to convey to
someone “I’m happy.” And yet here we are. As Mimi Ito, a
cultural anthropologist at UC Irvine, explains, “when people
are given the capacity to communicate in these ways, they’re
picking them up and developing whole new forms of
literacy.”
MORE EMOJI
For now, emoji does the job. We are more connected than
ever—what Ito terms a state of “ambient pervasive
communication”—and we need to know that our connections
are not being misunderstood. We need to let people know,
even people very far away, staring at a screen, that we’re
happy. Or confused. Or joking. Or missing them. Despite the
popularity of the “joy” symbol, emoji are not solely being
used to convey joy. My friend (the one with the crying-emojisending mother) sent me a combo she’s fond of: Grinning
Face With Smiling Eyes with Pistol pointed to its head
. (Taken together, they read as “stress,” which
is particularly useful in New York.) One of my favorite emoji
usages was when I asked online whether anyone could give
me an emoji-only review of the VMAs on MTV and someone
tweeted, simply, a Hammer emoji poised over a TV Set
emoji. This was the most succinct and astute review of the
show that I could find anywhere, which suggests that emoji
are coming into their own as a useful linguistic tool.
Fred Benenson, who works at Kickstarter, is even more
optimistic about the future of emoji. He should be: He’s the
guy who, partly as an art project, partly to see if he could,
spearheaded the translation of the whole of Moby-Dick into
emoji. He also worked with Lawrence Lessig, the Harvard
academic who’s written extensively on the ways in which
apparently apolitical computer coding can influence our laws
and even our human rights. So Benenson recognizes that
emoji, for all their supposed transience, are an important
addition to language, especially now that we do so much
communicating online. “The fact that emoji is available in
software legitimizes it as a form of human expression,” he
says. “And especially now—we’re so intimate with these
devices and we’re saying some of our most compelling things
to each other in the form of text messages and social media.”
In other words, we’ve stumbled on whole new confusing
ways to communicate with each other, so we’ve been given a
whole new vocabulary to say “I’m laughing,” or “joy,” or
“Well done.” This new way will not replace all the old ways,
but it can augment them and help us muddle through. In lieu
of being able to read each other’s faces when we say these
things, we’ve developed these surrogate faces. They’re
simple. They’re silly. They don’t yet have a taco. But they
work, at least a little, at least right now. We blow each other
kisses. We smile with hearts in our eyes. We cry tears of joy.
We say “I love you,” but in a million different ways, each one
freighted with the particular meaning we hope fervently to
convey, then send them out hopefully, like a smiley face in a
bottle, waiting to be received by the exact person it was
intended for, and opened up, and understood completely.
*This article appears in the November 17, 2014 issue of New
York Magazine.