tl;dr: contemplating a meta-language of communication.

My latest binge watch is the show Madam Secretary. It starts Téa Leoni as the US Secretary of State Elizabeth McCord and involves a mix of her personal life as well as geopolitical intrigue.

As a student of International Relations, a longtime DC resident, and a dad, I find the mix to be very interesting.

She is a very smooth diplomat mixing elegance and grace with the occasional heavy-handedness. There’s a lot to learn from how she weaves the two into every episode, sometimes in the same scene.

In the show I was watching last night, she made a comment to her husband who responded with a comment along the lines of
“LOL, heart eyes, double wink” and Leoni’s character responded with

“I love it when you speak emoji.”

The Emoji Game

My kids and I play a game on our family group on Snapchat that goes like this.

• One of us picks a category (movies, basketball teams, famous historical figures, etc.)
• Then, the other players have to think of one (Frozen, Miami Heat, Queen Victoria, etc.) but they don’t tell the other players.
• Then, we each submit three different emojis into the group chat. (two snowflakes and a princess, a palm tree/sun/sweat, queen/champion/uk flag)
• Finally, each of us tries to guess the submissions of the other players.
• Whoever is first, wins.

It really challenges you to think “outside the box” and it’s like a form of hieroglyphics.

Surrounded by Emojis

I got the idea for this morning’s post (I was suffering from a bit of writer’s block) by just noticing that emojis were all around me.

There are two emoji cups on my desk, a set of stickers on the counter, and a whole slew in my WhatsApp messages.

And it occurred to me the role that emojis play in our lives.

Then I started to wonder “was Secretary McCord on to something? Is ‘speaking emoji’ a language in the same way that English is?

Or is it like “being diplomatic?”

Or maybe it’s both?

My 12 year old daughter actually has told me that “you don’t speak emoji particularly well,” which is probably true because when I started using emojis, it was purely limited to keyboard characters.  

:) 8~( and so on. I suppose I’m an emoji originalist.

As the world gets more global (and yet more fragmented), I just wonder how effectively emojis translate across cultures.

Is “speaking emoji” something that is actually going to be a differentiator for effective communicators?

Will we risk disagreements because of misplaced emojis?

Ironically enough, last night, in a Slack chat, I had intended to indicate my support for a post by using the pointer finger. Sort of like “hey, I agree with the post above.”

However, my old man eyes made a mistake and I ended up putting the middle finger on the post. I didn’t even notice until the original poster asked me if that was my intention. Fortunately, he figured out the mistake and gently corrected me.

I will continue to raise my game and I’ve updated my LinkedIn profile accordingly.