Tired? Hungry? In the mood to get kinky? There’s an emoji for that. With another 250 brand-spanking-new symbols on their way to your smartphone, the argument for emojis as the real universal language grows stronger by the day. So, will emojis ever replace the written word? Grazia investigates…
Back in the late 90s, Japan’s most popular mobile service provider, NTT DoCoMo, started offering clients the option of adding digital pictographs to text messages. They were pretty basic – think smiley faces, sad faces and love hearts. When other Japanese service providers started jumping on the bandwagon, the Unicode Consortium was created to standardize emoji use across all platforms and devices. When Apple started adding emojis (which literally translates as “picture letter”) to the iPhone in 2011, a global phenomenon was born. Today, we have more than 800 different emojis to choose from.
Emojis can make your relationships stronger
When approached by New Tech City to see if they could maintain their two-year relationship solely via emoji communication for at least a month, New Yorkers Alex Goldmark and Liza Stark were more than game. There’s nothing like having your own special secret language to bring a couple closer together, right? Right.
But instead of limiting themselves to the emojis available on their smartphones, in a bid to expand their new vocabulary Alex and Liza put down cold hard cash to purchase and download all the emoji apps they could find. After each picking an emoji to represent themselves (a baseball cap-wearing guy for Alex, a brunette for Liza), it was game on. They had to manage 30 days of making plans, sharing life experiences and even just casually chatting with nothing but a string of symbols to string together and decipher.
Non-visual Alex admittedly found that emojis encouraged him to be more affectionate to Liza more often – he felt more comfortable sending her smiley faces with hearts for eyes than typing out “I love you” repeatedly. Liza says, “Somebody telling you that they love you is great and beautiful and wonderful, but getting those stickers, getting those emojis, was a different experience.” Alex adds, “The winking bunny goes a long way, let me tell you.”
But both discovered that while it is quicker to send a sequence of emojis than to type out an actual sentence, it takes a lot longer to figure out what someone is saying when they only use emojis. Especially if that message happens to be “Don’t come to drinks. My friend has had a death in the family.” Awkward.
Emojis show your state of mind
“I unintentionally began the project with a simple Facebook status that said, ‘Pretty sure you can do a complete psychoanalysis of someone based on their recently used emojis’, and people really responded to it,” says Brooklyn-based copywriter Daniel Brill of his decision to create the Tumblr Emojinalysis (emojinalysis.tumblr.com). It’s here that Dan uses emoji know-how to psychoanalyse anyone willing to submit a screenshot of their recently used emojis to him via Gmail or Twitter.
“I was texting and caught a glimpse of my own recently used emojis, and it was a dark scene. Lots of stressed faces, booze and exploding things. I had to ask myself, ‘Am I okay?’ I realised you can tell a lot about someone’s mental state based on their emojis. So instead of delving into my issues, I decided to analyse other peoples’ instead,” Dan tells us. “To date I’ve got over 6 000 of them and at one point was receiving hundreds a day. All the pressure has led to a host of new psychological problems for me. Everyone seems to be in on the joke, which is good, because I think taking my highly irresponsible pseudo-analysis seriously could be dangerous for your health. But people do get overly excited about receiving their analysis – one girl told me she was so excited she almost threw up.
“I’ve lost count of all the countries that have submitted but can’t think of many that haven’t. The Pile of Poop emoji may be the emoji that connects us all. Maybe the UN should adopt it as its flag.”
Why are emojis so popular all of a sudden? According to Dan, “I think they hit that crucial sweet spot of cute, funny and bizarre. If you can be in the centre of that Venn diagram, you’ve got a shot at becoming part of the internet-era zeitgeist. Plus, they’re incredibly versatile – have you seen the emoji music videos?”
Of his tongue-in-cheek social experiment, he says, “I suppose the most surprising thing about this project is how people have bought into the validity of the whole ‘emojinalysis’ idea – that your recently used emojis really can be a window into the state of your life. ABC News here in the US even did an article on it, where they consulted an actual child psychologist on the theory, and she agreed with it! At the end of the day, though, I’m just trying to make people laugh.”
Pictures soon worth 1 000 words
Even though the Emojipedia helps standardise the meaning of emojis across the world, the way they are used will always be up to personal interpretation. Simply stringing them together, without reproducing something that we already know, won’t make a language. Until we can agree on universal rules for using emoji in the correct sequence, they’ll always be a means of adding emotion and impact to messages, rather than being the message.