As someone who experiences a low level of anxiety regarding what technology is doing to my brain and my behaviour, I've observed the growth of the emoji with interest. Emoji use has become more and more complex, showing that privileged smartphone users will go very far out of their way to tie themselves up in all sorts of knots when it comes to generating problems amongst people who don't really have any. A recent piece in The Atlantic analysed why white Americans are less inclined to use white-people emojis due to a discomfort with asserting their own race.
One thing I am genuinely concerned about though, is how emojis may be eroding our powers of articulation. Humans are visual mammals. We like looking at faces and searching for empathy. Anthropomorphism, attributing human emotions to non-human entities (or as I like to call it
*mischievous monkey with its paws over its mouth that is actually the speak-no-evil monkey emoji*
), is a favourite human pastime. It’s why people plaster their
feeds with photos and descriptions of their dog’s lives as if they are real people, and see emotions and multiple meanings in the emoji of floating (potentially dismembered?) fingers having their nails painted pink.
Nearly all of my emoji use is back and forth with friends. But if moving to WhatsApp makes us lose email contact, moving to email made us lose phone contact, and sending someone a birthday card became posting "hbd" on a Facebook wall, and all of the above ended letter-writing, does emoji use emotionally stunt us? Is it laziness, or do emojis convey something deeper than words? Does sending the lone red siren emoji better articulate the state of one's hangover than a detailed explanation of what happened last night? Or should I really be worried about what part of my written communication emojis are eroding? What about worrying about global warming instead (*sun emoji* *snowman emoji*), or José Mourinho joining Manchester Utd (*dancing flamenco lady emoji*; *stack of dollar bills with wings emoji*).
Being annoyed by technology's impact on my mind while fully embracing it is futile. Either you care that sitting undistracted in silence is now a foreign pastime and stop the rot, or you just succumb to the inanity of digital communication. But as I find myself absentmindedly choosing emojis over words, I wonder how much the obsession with pictures over text in digital communication is damaging verbal and written communication, or even ending it completely. Just as "lol" became a reply in text messages designed to end a conversation, and "liking" a tweet is now the default manner in which to end a Twitter exchange, emojis have become visual full stop. Exchanges conclude with the *ok hand sign* emoji, or a thumbs up, or the two dancing ladies in black leotards. The smiley face itself now feels childish or naive.
Although its modern origins are sometimes disputed and claimed by various people, American graphic artist Harvey Ball designed a smiley in 1963 for a life assurance company undergoing a merger that led to low morale amongst its staff. Ball was paid $45 for his design, and didn't trademark it, so he wasn't able to cash in on the smiley face being plastered across tee-shirts and badges in the '70s, or its adaptation by the Watchmen graphic novel, or acid house's affinity for it, or Nirvana using x's for eyes and creating their iconic smiley logo. But back in 1969, Vladimir Nabokov articulated the desire for symbols in text to portray emotion, to which I say *man with black Russian-like hat pulled over his eyes that is probably actually one of those Buckingham Palace guards emoji*.
So even he, one of the greatest writers of all time, felt the need for, if not a symbol of a ghost sticking its tongue out, at least some sort of visual expression in text that transcended the written word. “I often think there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile,” Nabokov said in a newspaper interview, “some sort of concave mark, a supine round bracket . . .”
The more throwaway our communication becomes, the less tangible it is, the less of an effort it takes, the more cartoonish and overloaded it seems to become with exaggeration. For a generation for whom language is wrapped up in irony and deliberate hyperbole, satisfaction and delight are often expressed in violent terms: “Dead”, “killing it”, “I’m dying”. Considering the amount of information available to us online, with news stories and articles and videos and everything else competing for attention, only the most hyperbolic survive.
And so a photo of a new manicure becomes “the absolute best thing in my life right now ever”, or websites proclaim a list of things you have to do before you die as if when faced with a terminal illness, going to a new restaurant in a Dublin suburb will be on your bucket list. In an era of heightened language, we are competing for emotional drama and impact. Naturally, the more you proclaim something the greatest thing that has every happened to you (an avocado on toast, a new notebook, your cat staring into space), the less impact those words have. Enter the emoji, perhaps not so much emotional shorthand anymore, but something we use when we “can’t cope”, “can’t even”, and when There. Are. No. Words. Róisín Ingle is on leave