Emojis open door to more encompassing forms of expression


Photo courtesy of flickr.com

Photo courtesy of flickr.com

Yesterday, I had a conversation with my best friend using emojis alone. And before you ask, yes, I was disgusted with myself.

On one hand, I do feel like I should justify my actions. We know each other, so we know that the pizza emoji doesn’t just mean pizza — it means I want pizza now and we should eat it together. So the tiny iPhone keyboard carries more than just the weight of the literal pictures. And clearly my actions aren’t alone; last June, the launch social network Emojli allowed people to communicate only via emoji.

Ever since the takeover of our everyday communications by these tiny, emotion-filled faces (read: emojis), many have praised the integration of visual expressions of emotion into our now text-based communication that seems so…heartless.

And it’s fair to say that emojis help overcome the confusion behind intention of text-based communication. But since emojis suffer from the same standardized framework as language, on a philosophical level they too are inherently insufficient to completely capture the human experience.

It seems intuitive that words can never fully describe our internal thought process behind each of our actions or truly encapsulate descriptions of our surroundings. Some see this inability as a gift; like in the childhood Telephone Game, in which each person in a circle whispers to the next person what they believe the one before them said, the incongruity between what is said and what is meant can create artistic — or hilarious — results.

But the insufficiencies of language can prove dire to some as well. In fields such as trauma, psychiatry and psychology, even the scientific terms to describe pain (for example, distress, negative emotions, social pain and emotional disturbances), as author Luciano L’Abate describes, “are either left undefined, or if defined, are insufficient and inadequate to describe the internally subjective experience derived from abandonment, abuse, loss, criticism, discounting, or betrayal.”

The introduction of quick visual cues to more deeply portray these emotions, then, should cure the failures of language. But emojis suffer from the same standardization that language does; just as there are a limited number of words and a limited number of ways to string them together, there are a limited number of emojis and thus a limited range of emotions to portray. Granted, there are quite a few to choose from — 722 on the iPhone —but they pale in comparison to the complex sentiments we experience in a single moment that we’d like to share with others.

There is perhaps no way to condense all of our unique intentions into a widely used form of communication. But the rise of emoji culture, the integration of visual and audial forms of communication and the increased desire to share every moment of our lives might bring us very close to making this reality more and more of a possibility.

Sonali Seth is a freshman majoring in political science. Her column, “Sonacrates,” runs Tuesdays.