Values In Design
Should emoji replace words?
In 2015, Oxfords Dictionary word of a year became an emoji. Yes, an emoji, which official name is ‘Face with Tears of Joy’. 😂
The main question for this essay is “Should emoji replace words”? In the beginning of this essay I would like to tell a brief history of emoji, how it all started. Then I would like to discuss emoji topic from positive and negative side and in the end of an essay I will try to conclude everything and give my opinion and answer on the main question of the essay.
It all started in 1963, when the company commissioned Harvey Ball, a freelance artist, was asked to come up with something, that will make people cheer up. He had an idea to offer: a yellow face with two dots and a wide grin. This smiley face was used in many companies and results were the following: employees started to smile more to their customers and the atmosphere in companies became more friendly. “The power of a smile is unlimited,” proclaimed The Mutualite, the company’s internal magazine: “A smile is contagious. It is entertainment and medicine. It is food for friendship.” Then, in 1969, Vladimir Nabokov suggested the utility of expressing feelings via typographical shorthand in an interview with the New York Times:
Q: How do you rank yourself among writers (living) and of the immediate past?
Nabokov: I often think there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile—some sort of concave mark, a supine round bracket, which I would now like to trace in reply to your question. (Nabokov, 1969)
During the late 1960s, the smiley face began to appear everywhere: T-shirts, signs, buttons, children’s pencil cases; by the early 1980s, the image became a permanent feature of Western pop cultural representation.
Once, Scott E. Fahlman, a young faculty member in Carnegie Mellon University’s suggested a “joke marker” on a university bulletin board (or bboard) on September of 1982 (Kennedy, 2012). There was much wordplay in the world of Carnegie Mellon University’s (CMU) board, but sarcasm and dry humour were often misread. Fahlman first pitched the idea of the “emoticon” in this bboard message:
I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers: :-)
Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use :-(
After a brief history of emoji, I would like to discuss benefits of emoji. Nowadays it’s much easier to express ourselves by sending a small yellow face, instead of typing a message. Instead of writing “Hi” we sometimes send 👋 . We can say what mood do we have by sending 😀 or 😒 . Emojis are facilitating a wider range of text-based emotional communication—without emoji, Kurita claimed, “you don’t know what’s in the writer’s head”—it can also mean that our digital communication became much easier. In addition, we have emojis for almost all everyday situations – going to shower, shopping, vacation, all kinds of transportation, food, faces. If considering social media, in 2013 Facebook introduced the ability to choose from a variety of emojis as part of a status update. Users might choose if they feel happy, sad, frustrated etc. Emojis also might support your message: it drags more attention if you use some visuals, instead of just plain text.
However, there is also a down side of emojis. Even though emojis can be used to express yourself, it also can be misinterpreted. Lo (2008) provided additional evidence that emoticons affect interpretation, showing that the same text can be perceived as either happy or sad depending on which emoticon accompanies it. For each user emoji has his own meaning and also the way you use it might affect the whole initial message. In addition, emoji character set hews “to a very narrow view of culture, one that is mostly white and heterosexual,” notes Mercedes Kraus (2013), one of the collaborators in the Emoji Art and Design Show. That means, that we still don’t have a full emoji set. Based on the Fitzpatrick scale, the schema for skin tone modifiers was proposed (five different shades ranging from dark brown to pink), which The Guardian described as “a recognized standard used by dermatologists” (Tan, 2015). So even though some users are satisfied with all emojis, some people are still feel discriminated.
Recently, there was a big debate about the salad emoji. The original Google salad emoji had tomatoes, lettuce and eggs. However, some vegans were not satisfied with eggs in a salad, so they asked to update this emoji. The Google UX Manager, Jennifer Daniel, make a post of Twitter, explaining the change:
There's big talk about inclusion and diversity at Google so if you need any evidence of Google is making this priority may I direct your attention to the 🥗 emoji— we've removed the egg in Android P beta 2, making this a more inclusive vegan salad.
Besides this case, there are many other examples, when people complain about emojis, that they need to be changed. Considering my previous “good” example of emojis – wide range of emoji selection on Facebook. It also has a negative side - “By selecting your current activity instead of merely writing it out, you structure data for Facebook,” TechCrunch observed when the feature was rolled out. So, when for users it’s just a nice and fun thing to do, Facebook uses it for their own benefit. Furthermore, emoji also hold out the promise of emotional standardisation in the service of data analysis: since a certain feeling is summed up in one emoji, it can be more easily tracked and categorised.
To conclude everything above mentioned, I would like to say that even since the human existed, they had drawings on the walls in caves. People were always trying to say something through drawing. It is natural. So, at some point, we had to come up with something similar in digital world. That’s how emojis started to exist and become popular in digital communication. However, the emoji topic is controversial. On the one hand it became much easier for us, users, to communicate with each other and understand each other. For example, Facebook – by seeing the most used emojis (as a reaction to some post) we can already realise if it’s something positive or negative, without reading the comments. Emojis also might support our initial message, express our mood or even activity. On the other hand, it also influences our digital communication. People became lazier in a sense that it’s easier to send an emoji than type words. In addition, emojis might have many different meanings for each of us, which might lead to miscommunication and misunderstanding. Even though it’s hard to answer the question “Should emoji replace words?”, I can say for sure, that even if it will happen, emojis will replace words only in a digital world. In a real world, we can only communicate by talking to each other, so emojis won’t influence this part of our lives.
