Casual Conversation

🙃¿Que?🙂

It sounds like you don’t consider emojis appropriate. How come?

Have an urgent message you want to send to someone who is not uptight or a snob? In the same way in which people smile to be kind or be welcoming, I use emojis:

“Thanks for the file ☺️”

In the same way that people mirror emotions, I use emojis: “I’m sorry about the presentation 😢” “Yeah. Those reports can take quite a while to digest 😅”

In the same way that emotionally intelligent people are candid and therefore vulnerable and able to connect with others, I use emojis*: “It’s taking forever to load 😭” “I’m kinda nervous about tomorrow’s meeting 😬”

*Of course, my dumb ass is far from emotionally intelligent. I just strive to create connection.

I recognize that, at times, a social situation could seem to demand deference beyond emojis. At the same time, there are many situations where emojis could be appropriate. I am trying to let you see why and in what contexts someone would use emojis ☺️.

Also, there’s the whole Poe’s Law issue. Emojis can help with clarity.

☝️👎

So do you also expect everyone over 12 to always keep a pokerface in real life conversations, or is this rule confined to virtual spaces for some arbitrary reason?

🤓☝️

Abraham Lincoln supposedly used an emoticon in one of his speeches from 1862 (though there is debate about whether it was an accident or added by the typesetter), and the guy who is credited with officially inventing the emoticon was a Carnegie Mellon Comp Sci professor. In introducing it, he explained that it could help clarify sarcasm versus serious comments in digital communications.

Tone isn't conveyed easily through the written word, sometimes an emoji helps to clarify how something is being said. 👍

You phrase all this as a negative but I think it is in fact a very beautiful way to look at it. A true shift going back to our bare roots of human literature.😃

I am not pulling your leg here. I do think it is actually a really interesting thought you put here. I just don't see it in a negative sense.

In fact, what are words if not deep-rooted human expressions? What would that make emojis in the first place?

We did not invent words to carry knowledge and improve oir culture, we invented writing, and guess what, alphabets and words only came in thousands of years after that. Before it we had cuneiforms and various forms of pictograms, so don't assume the superiority of strictly alphabetic languages over other forms of communications.

Let's take english as a language, its capacity to convey emotion is quite limited as it was not born a language for literature. Language evolve, new forms of communication are born and merge with existing ones and together they are more powerful. It's not like we will switch to emoji only, altough if an emoji only culture existed, they would frown upon our "inexpressive, needlessly verbose weird letters" just like you are doing. Don't underestimate the scare of cultural changes over convention choices