We were at a concert when Maggie saw the woman her husband had cheated on her with. She’d planned her response in advance: a simple introduction, then she’d just stand there and watch the other woman react to her last name with (ideally) horrified guilt. But in the moment, Maggie couldn’t speak. Her face flushed. Her hands shook. We left immediately.
On the walk home she finally spoke, the words coming so fast she almost choked. I rubbed her back. This is when face-to-face communication is crucial—nothing I could have said would have helped, but gestures (hugs, back rubs, concerned face) made it clear I’d heard her and understood. According to the psychiatric journal Activitas Nervosa Superior, “Emotion arises from sensory stimulation and is typically accompanied by physiological and behavioral changes in the body.” We express our emotions most clearly through physical reactions—Maggie’s flushed cheeks and shaking hands—and receive comfort most effectively this way too. In highly emotional situations, gestures and expressions can usually communicate better than words.
But gestures weren’t available the next day, so I did what any busy, young, too-broke-to-send-flowers New Yorker checking on a friend from work would do: I sent a few emojis. But what was the right combination of tiny pictures to say, “I’m sorry you’re going through this and I know it sucks hard now and I want you to know it won’t suck forever because you’re great”?
Turns out, for Maggie at least, the right emoji sequence to symbolize sympathizing with heartbreak is a series of smiley poops. Two days later we had dinner in person. “I’m feeling better,” she said. “I had a session with my therapist… And your text the other day made me laugh—that helped.”
Tiny cartoon poops helped.
It sounds stupid. Their cuteness makes any serious conversation about emojis difficult, like talking to a baby in a grown-up voice. It feels embarrassing to posit these little cartoons as a vehicle of emotion or even a global language, yet they really are an almost universally understood form of communication. Most studies by social scientists, linguists, and psychologists skew pro-emoji (“A smiling emoticon activates the same brain areas as the image of a person smiling and can therefore be considered as a representation of that emotion” reads one study), but that doesn’t stop them from seeming a little foolish: eensy cartoon images, designed to be typed alongside or in lieu of text, uncool in their enthusiasm and earnestness.
Though the most tweeted emoji is a heart, most other top emojis, lending weight to the emoticon/emotion connection, are faces:
…and the list goes on. Smiley poop is #90 out of 845, not bad as far as poop goes, but definitely not top 10. Even so, it’s been used more than eight million times since July of last year, on Twitter alone, according to the mesmerizing, potentially seizure-inducing real-time emojitracker.com.
Why can’t we stop using emojis? Are they ridiculous, turning us into the equivalent of button-pressing Neanderthals? Or are they brilliant, providing a global medium to express our emotions and creativity? “Emojis mean everything and they mean nothing at the same time,” designer Liza Nelson wrote on her emoji art tumblr, Emoji IRL. LOL. “They’re really quite stupid. And they’re the best thing that ever happened to our generation.”
On the walk home she finally spoke, the words coming so fast she almost choked. I rubbed her back. This is when face-to-face communication is crucial—nothing I could have said would have helped, but gestures (hugs, back rubs, concerned face) made it clear I’d heard her and understood. According to the psychiatric journal Activitas Nervosa Superior, “Emotion arises from sensory stimulation and is typically accompanied by physiological and behavioral changes in the body.” We express our emotions most clearly through physical reactions—Maggie’s flushed cheeks and shaking hands—and receive comfort most effectively this way too. In highly emotional situations, gestures and expressions can usually communicate better than words.
But gestures weren’t available the next day, so I did what any busy, young, too-broke-to-send-flowers New Yorker checking on a friend from work would do: I sent a few emojis. But what was the right combination of tiny pictures to say, “I’m sorry you’re going through this and I know it sucks hard now and I want you to know it won’t suck forever because you’re great”?
Turns out, for Maggie at least, the right emoji sequence to symbolize sympathizing with heartbreak is a series of smiley poops. Two days later we had dinner in person. “I’m feeling better,” she said. “I had a session with my therapist… And your text the other day made me laugh—that helped.”
Tiny cartoon poops helped.
It sounds stupid. Their cuteness makes any serious conversation about emojis difficult, like talking to a baby in a grown-up voice. It feels embarrassing to posit these little cartoons as a vehicle of emotion or even a global language, yet they really are an almost universally understood form of communication. Most studies by social scientists, linguists, and psychologists skew pro-emoji (“A smiling emoticon activates the same brain areas as the image of a person smiling and can therefore be considered as a representation of that emotion” reads one study), but that doesn’t stop them from seeming a little foolish: eensy cartoon images, designed to be typed alongside or in lieu of text, uncool in their enthusiasm and earnestness.
Though the most tweeted emoji is a heart, most other top emojis, lending weight to the emoticon/emotion connection, are faces:
…and the list goes on. Smiley poop is #90 out of 845, not bad as far as poop goes, but definitely not top 10. Even so, it’s been used more than eight million times since July of last year, on Twitter alone, according to the mesmerizing, potentially seizure-inducing real-time emojitracker.com.
Why can’t we stop using emojis? Are they ridiculous, turning us into the equivalent of button-pressing Neanderthals? Or are they brilliant, providing a global medium to express our emotions and creativity? “Emojis mean everything and they mean nothing at the same time,” designer Liza Nelson wrote on her emoji art tumblr, Emoji IRL. LOL. “They’re really quite stupid. And they’re the best thing that ever happened to our generation.”
by Mary Mann, Medium | Read more:
Images: Liza Nelson
