The Emoji Phenomenon

By soyernesto | Curious Nook | 21 Jan 2025


Hello friends, I hope you are having a nice day. I have decided to participate in the initiative "The Emoji Phenomenon", proposed by @eudemo, this being my first post in this community.

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Talking about emojis at this point seems like an old task, so we won't go into concepts. Instead, I will do a simple exercise of free thinking (writing).

Emojis are already part of our daily lives and have quickly mimicked the written word, occupying positions and emotions that were difficult to express before. Jumping between platforms, each one with its own design style and peculiarities. They go beyond objects and words, becoming complex emotions that are detached from the original meaning that was given to the images. Even we ourselves may have our own particular emoji dictionary, which responds to unique situations and experiences and few people can understand it.

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Let's take as an example the emoji of the hole in the floor 🕳️. It can literally represent a hole in the floor, but maybe if you send it after a sad news, it can represent an emotional hole. Or if you say: "I'm hungry 🕳️", it can represent that you have a hole in your stomach (figuratively). And therein I think lies the greatest magic of communicating with pictograms: each person endows it with his or her own meaning beyond archetypes.

The representation of feelings and emotions through emojis also has a peculiar way of behaving. For example, each heart emoji and its color transmits a different feeling, but that culturally can change.

Something very interesting is the distribution in which the emojis are always found. We always find them in first place, represented with human faces to their minimum expression. These emojis represent feelings: joy, frustration, fear... Then come objects, food, transportation, places, symbols, etc., with few variations, but they are always there. A combination of these groups gives us an almost infinite possibility to emojis to transmit practically any message.

I would like to dedicate the last part of this blog to answer some of the questions raised that I consider very interesting.

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Questions:

  • Can emojis be considered a universal language?

To a certain extent, I could consider them a universal language, but personally, they seem to be a complement and support tool to formulate ideas that can be extremely difficult to say with words or ideas that can by themselves have a certain degree of universality. However, as I was saying before, emojis may not escape from cultural ties such as the meaning of certain poses and colors.

  • Have emojis transformed the way we communicate?

Undoubtedly, they have transformed our way of communicating, adding simplicity and speed to conversations, even overcoming linguistic barriers. They have also achieved an automatic attention effect on certain points in the conversation, but I do not think it is a new phenomenon or that it is already 100% developed in its entirety. Emojis will evolve as new communicative needs appear.

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  • Have emojis enriched or impoverished the language?

Undoubtedly, I repeat, emojis are a tool or complement to the written language, therefore, I do not believe in the impoverishment of the language by the use of emojis. The final message is the total responsibility of the person who writes it and it is vital that it is understood. If emojis are not conveying the sentiment and hindering the language, you are simply doing it wrong.

  • What role will emojis play in the future of digital communication?

As of today, we see that emojis have mutated and will continue to mutate into more complex forms. We already have stickers, animations, even emojis in Augmented Reality. Every day they are more diverse and representative, reflecting more the current society. Therefore, it is not unreasonable to think of their vital communicative role in the future, perhaps reaching places so far vetoed for them by the seriousness and, sometimes, the childish way in which emojis are seen. I speak of business places, government and even medicine, but I believe that the future at present is excessively vertiginous and only time has the final words.

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Well, I hope you enjoyed reading. I'd love to hear your opinions about these topics and if you answer me in the comments with emojis, even better 😁. Big greetings and many successes. see you next time!

 


Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
Cover obtained from the initiative’s publication.

Image by Florian Pircher from Pixabay
Foto de Denis Cherkashin en Unsplash
Foto de wu yi en Unsplash
Foto de charlesdeluvio en Unsplash

All assets, illustrations and banners have been created by me and are original content, unless otherwise specified.

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soyernesto
soyernesto

Passionate about art and writing. Always learning, always growing. Excited to share and learn more every day!


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