Full disclosure: The emotional icon (aka emoji) has been a pet peeve of mine from its beginning. I have quixotically refused to use them (except for this post), even though the majority of my friends and colleagues unabashedly do. Emojis have always seemed silly and superfluous to me. Also, I\u2019ve found that the intended meaning of an emoji is often hard to understand.<\/p>\n
And so, I carried on in this Luddite way. Then two months ago, a well-researched opinion article on the emoji appeared in the Globe and Mail\u200a[1]<\/sup>, forcing me to take a second look.<\/p>\n There was a time and place for the emoji. Twitter launched in 2006 with a 140-character limit, including spaces. This paragraph is 146 characters.<\/p>\n 2006 was also the beginning of main stream smart phone adoption. Mobile keyboards were tiny and human fingers needed some time to gain typing proficiency. The combined rise of the Twitter social media platform and smartphone use made the emoji a useful innovation to add more meaning and more importantly, tonal context, to a message with character restrictions.<\/p>\n Initially, the emoji was created by users from keyboard characters, as in :) and lol. By 2011 it became graphic and built-in: \ud83d\ude0a and \ud83d\ude02. For me, the emoji graphic style is somewhere between video-game and anime. Without an appreciation of Japanese culture, that translated (to me) as juvenile.<\/p>\n As the world moved on without me (at least on this point), the need for online character brevity declined while emoji options grew exponentially. And they seemed to evolve whimsically.<\/p>\n Curiously, the last Great Emoji Marketing Moment above is what the Globe and Mail article is about: there is a clear lack of \u2018emoji consistency\u2019, defined as the emoji\u2019s ability to mean the same thing to everyone. This inconsistency is cultural and generational. Emojis are even inconsistent across mobile devices. To researchers, the gold standard for an emoji\u2019s ability to communicate an emotion is the English word it represents. So why not just use that word?<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div> If we think of emojis as a universal language, then we have to wonder why there are so many misinterpretations.”<\/p>\n \u2014 Canadian linguist Gretchen McCulloch<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div> This quote stopped me. Ms McCulloch goes on to suggest emojis are really just digital gestures which are context-specific, have no standards and mean different things to different people.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div> The emoji has outlived its usefulness. In fact, it\u2019s hurting our ability to communicate to others clearly and meaningfully. At least those outside our comfort bubble. I fear we\u2019re right where, in 1962, Marshall McLuhan predicted we would be, and why.\u200a[5]<\/sup><\/p>\n Kill the emoji, please.The Original View<\/h3>\n
Great Emoji Cultural Moments<\/h3>\n
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Great Emoji Marketing Moments<\/h3>\n
![\"Poop](\"https:\/\/coyote.ca\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/05\/poop-emoji-ice-cream-graphic_600x337.webp\")
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The Second Look<\/h3>\n
\ud83d\udc80 The Emoji, \ud83d\ude4f<\/h3>\n
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