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Go away, emojis

If you are alive and have a smartphone, you’ve probably used an emoji, had an emoji used in a text to you, or read some kind of article talking about how people love emojis.
Robin Tarnowetzki

If you are alive and have a smartphone, you’ve probably used an emoji, had an emoji used in a text to you, or read some kind of article talking about how people love emojis.

Now, despite spending roughly 90 per cent of the time I’m not sleeping online or on my phone, I detest many popular online components. I hate hearing about the mundane aspects of people’s daily lives on Facebook. I used Twitter for about three months and then quit. I hate clickbait headlines in the first person.

Now, this isn’t going to be a rant about hating emojis, but this article relates because, like the above, emojis are something popular of which I do not understand the appeal. This is a question that’s been plaguing me for years: why are they so popular?

It seems like every other week there’s some kind of article about a company using emojis in marketing materials (Pepsi) or something about the poop emoji or how people just love emojis.

Am I missing something? They’re little happy faces or pictures. I only ever get the urge to use the text versions of the happy and sad faces. I text a lot; a quick glance at my phone says that my top three conversations have over 5,000 texts, almost 1,500 texts, and a bit over 700 texts. And not once in any of those texts have I ever thought, “Hmm, I wish there was some visual representation of this word. My text just isn’t jazzy enough.” I would really love it if someone could really, articulately explain to me why the world is obsessed with emojis. I’ve also never been a visual person, so that could be it. But I really, truly, do not understand why someone would stop their text and take the time to flip through their emojis to pick the exact right one, instead of just sending the text as is.

Facebook is rolling out a new update where you can show your reaction to posts via emoji. You may think it would be a matter of adding a smiley face, a sad face, an angry face, and a shocked face. Not so! Staff at Facebook ended up consulting with sociologists about “the range of human emotion.” They combined this with data about how people use Facebook to come up with the reactions of “Love,” “Haha,” “Yay,” “Wow,” “Sad,” and “Angry.” I am glad we can now have our complex emotions boiled down to yellow circles.

Probably the most perplexing case of using emojis is USA Today, which put emojis beside its front page stories. It’s obviously a stupid idea, but it seems like they had an emoji robot do it because there’s no consideration for taste or complexity. For example, one story was about one of the men who subdued a shooter on a French train who later got stabbed. The bright yellow emoji beside it is crying, as if someone had simply written an article about running out of milk for their cereal. After the outcry, USA Today’s editor released a statement: “Social media and its icons are becoming a dominant form of communication in our world. We wanted to show what they would be like if transferred to print.” Great, thanks for the non-statement. Obviously it’s something that should just stay online.

Here are some emojis you can use to dress up your conversation from a quick glance at my phone: a cat that is simultaneously laughing and crying, poop, a happy face with a hard hat, a kimono, four graphs, an extension cord, crossed Japanese flags, a centipede, the moon in various states of eclipse, an ATM, and clocks showing various times. Who is using these? Who loves them?

I could maybe accept this as a case of “People enjoy different things.” But what seriously confuses me is that emojis and emoticons are not some new thing. I remember being 12 years old after we got the Internet at home for the first time, tying up the phone line and talking to friends on MSN for hours and sending each other different emoticons. It feels like there’s some giant conspiracy where a corporation erased everyone’s memory of pre-smartphone emoticons and then gave them all a potion to make them fall in love with emojis.