Emojis are shit

The chat program Trillian had the best emoticons. Back during the regency era, my friends and I fell in love with them immediately and took them to other platforms long after we stopped using Trillian. They had a derpy cuteness and abundance of personality without being overly specific. Their meaning was negotiated and contextual. Like the human interaction we humans enjoy.

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There was ‘pipeface’ (7 down, 2nd from right in the image above), summoned with :Y. It’s a picture of a person with a resolute frown smoking a pipe. I have absolutely no idea whatsoever what it was intended to convey and it doesn’t matter - we used it when we knew we were being a bit pompous (perhaps playfully, perhaps not) or to convey finality - a sense of … and I will brook no further argument. “It’s a shit game and I shan’t play it :Y”, “Monet is overrated :Y”, “A meal fit for a king :Y”. There’s no emoji that does that.

Then there were ‘hugleft’ and ‘hugright’, summoned with ({) and (}) (4 down and 3 & 4 in on the image). We used this when we were feeling sad or vulnerable or just in need of comfort. One would request/offer with ({) and others would complete with (}). And there was a sense of completion to it - it was bilateral, like a hug.

And ‘nod’, summoned with (nod) (9 down, 3 in). This one was animated and, because of its unblinking stare and smug, slow nod, it was usually used sarcastically.

There are so many good ones but the last one I’ll touch on is inlove, summoned with %) (9 down, 2 in (left of (nod))). Another animated one where the eyes would kinda drift around resulting in a delirious expression that really captured feeling love in a way that the lazy sterility of 🥰 and 😍 simply do not.

My friends and I continued using the textual form of these emoticons long after we could convince the platforms we were chatting on to use the pictures. I still sometimes end sentences with ‘:Y’.

Emoticons were great. Whichever emoticons were used in a particular community would gain meanings specific to that community. They had personality and a bit of humanity to them, which allowed them to gain meaning through interpretation and use. To be contextual and fluid while, in a particular context, specific. They were aesthetically rich and semantically vague enough to encourage reading in - they were descriptive rather than prescriptive.

And then there’s the bland dead-eyed coporate HR-clipart of emojis…

Bland

They’re bland for the exact same reasons that clipart is bland - by design. They’re cornflakes - designed to elicit no feelings whatsoever. They’re as devoid of imagination and humanity as the corporate culture that shat them wetly onto our screens. They make Vettriano look like Caravaggio. They were begotten without love. The propaganda of purgatory.

If you want to send someone a hug you’ve got 🤗, which looks like a sex predator coming in for a titty grab or 🫂, two ghouls embracing limply. Corporations don’t understand love or compassion or comradeship. So this is what we get, a hug is either sex predation or two empty mannequins in a flaccid grapple.

Here’s the Trillian hug emoticon for contrast:

Sure it has the advantage of being animated but, that aside, there’s a warmth and humanity to it. It feels right. Because it was made by a person who had experienced a hug ever, not a consortium of Californian vampires.

There’s too many of them

There are so fucking many of them. According to the unicode website there are either 1910, if you look at the full emoji list or 3790 if you look at emoji counts. Either way, it’s a fucking lot.

To put that into perspective, the constructed language Toki Pona, created by Sonja Lang has 120-137 words. It’s a minimalistic language by design but it supports full conversations. With, at most, 1/16th the number of symbols as emoji. Could you have a full conversation in emoji? Could you fuck as like.

The language Trigedasleng, created by David J. Peterson for the TV show The 100 has about 1700 words and I know for a fact supports full conversations (and fanfics and song translations and so on) because I have friends who do that.

And emojis aren’t even a natural language - they don’t need to be able to express all that can be said - they exist, as did the earliest ASCII smileys, to convey what doesn’t come across easily in text - mood, tone, posture and so on.

Their job is just to augment natural language - to add a bit of warmth or to let the other person know I’m being facetious or feeling sympathetic or irritated or bored or delirious with love.

And somehow we’ve ended up with about 2000 of them. Which is far too many to visually scan through, as you could with emoticons back in the day, so you have to search. Which brings me to…

What’s going on with the fucking names?

I want to send 😐 so I search for “straight mouth” cos, y’know, we humans call that a straight-mouthed expression. I eventually find it under “neutral expression”. Which, first off, it isn’t really, that would be a blank-eyed stare. And, secondly, yeah that’s absolutely how humans talk. Neutral expression. Just set all our transistors to zero and that’s the expression we humans have.

I want to send a nod, so I search for… that. But no, “head shaking vertically”. Y’know, like we all say. “Yeah I agreed with her so I shook my head vertically.” So normal. So human.

I want to send 💦, so I search for water? Nope. Splash? Nope. Drip?! Nope. Oh it’s sweat droplets. Of course. Because we all think in anime.

This isn’t the fault of whatever software I happen to be using to send the message, these names are baked into the standard.

The primary problem is having so many that I need to search rather than picking at a glance. The secondary problem is that these names are a mishmash of, in some cases, trying to describe what’s happening without assuming any social or cultural context - some cultures don’t nod in agreement so let’s call it a “vertical head shake” - and, in other cases, describing them in a very specific cultural context as with “sweat droplets”.

They really don’t know whether they want to be general and standard or specific.

The general and the specific

Emoticons worked best when they tended towards aesthetic richness and semantic looseness. By which I mean they had a ton of personality and were visually fun, such that they invited reading-in and repurposing, and they were not too tied down semantically - I have no idea what pipeface was supposed to mean, we imbued it with meaning ourselves.

This allowed them to… do their job. To add context, emotion and situationality. Not to try to do the job of natural language and convey straightforward meaning.

Emojis go the absolute other way - aesthetically sterile and semantically nailed down.

Trillian had a couple of emoticons for food. So if I wanted to express that I was really looking forward to my food I could say “I’m making cheese on toast (food)(drool)”

It didn’t matter what food it was. Food is a shared human experience, it didn’t need to be specific.

Similarly there was one flag emoticon. It was just a red flag. It could be used to express shared pride or comradeship like “I’m watching India win the cricket with Nish (flag)” or “We’re going on the protest later (flag)” or “Branston Pickle was invented in Staffordshire (flag)”

It didn’t matter what the flag was, it just represented shared experience and communality in a particular context.

Oh but I see emojis have 300-odd flags so we’re all divided up again, lovely. The dream of the internet.

And 130 food items. 30ish Japanese foods, due to emoji’s heritage, a bunch of fruit and veg and the rest are mostly… foods that Californian techbros have heard of.

This is the problem with specificity. We have 130 very specific foods but not a single specific food item from Africa or South Asia. And one from West Asia because Californian techbros have had falafel I guess.

And no North Staffordshire oatcakes, an absolute fucking travesty (flag)

We’re going to end up with 5000 food emojis and it’ll never have the one you actually want in the moment unless you eat nothing but sushi and texmex. What an improvement over just having a plate of food!

But at least we’ve got the 🔰 emoji. For all the times every day I want to say 🔰 and would have no way to say 🔰 without 🔰 being an emoji 🙅

What?

Emoticons, and textual smileys before them, were made with love, by and for communities. They gained life within the communities in which they were used. They were fun and human, rich and fluid, and brought joy to communication by helping express those things that text doesn’t well.

Their strength was their abundance of visual personality and semantic flexibility. They worked through shared experience and communality, gaining more meaning as they were used in a particular community over time.

Emojis are sterile, lifeless slop handed down by our corporate brahmins, devoid of even a drop of humanity. They’re specific in all the places they should be universal and vice versa. They’re aesthetically dull and nailed-down semantically to the point of uselessness. Like the PMC HR-speak of their creators, they constrain our expression rather than amplifying it.

Emojis are ugly. In a more profound sense than just being unpleasant to look at (which they also are). They say something ugly about us and how we see ourselves. Emoticons were poetry and emojis are a CV, a marketing email, a corporate mission statement. They’re a Verschlimmbesserung :Y