I am astounded that anyone thinks that adding emojis can solve anything related to clarity of communication. We might as well be interpreting Egyptian cartoushes, for the lack of clarity involved.
A laughing emoji would let us know that you think it's funny that people are this inarticulate, although it'd be a touch condescending.
An eye-roll emoji would indicate a frustration with the problem, suggesting that it personally affects you in some way — perhaps your relatives are using too many emojis and it irritates you personally.
A frown emoji, meanwhile, would suggest a more sincere concern for the state of written communication in our culture, and would imply that you think something important is being lost.
Explaining the meaning of those three unicode characters in context took an additional 480 characters. Can you see why people use them? They're very efficient.
I appreciate the response, and the emphasis on adding emotional context in a shorthand. However:
- There are over 3,000 emojis defined in unicode, which is a very large vocabulary in which to become expert.
- There is no well-defined meaning for any of the emojis, even the "simple" common ones. One must try to infer from shared context what the sender means. This is fraught with error opportunities.
- They mean different things to different subgroups, and act as an "in-group" credential in many cases.
- They are visually very indistinct, and can be difficult to distinguish one from another for people who have less than perfect vision, or color-blindness.
- For people with autism or other non-neurotypical processing they can be completely unintelligible, rendering the communication even less successful than "traditional" language.
In short, emojis are undefined, colloquial, designed for only a small portion of the population, and have constantly shifting interpretations of a vast dictionary of symbols.
I don't know why that's a good idea for improving the clarity of communication.
> There are over 3,000 emojis defined in unicode, which is a very large vocabulary in which to become expert.
Most of those emoji aren't commonly used. There's a falafel emoji; no one's going around adding a falafel to the end of their messages trying to impart some hidden meaning.
> There is no well-defined meaning for any of the emojis, even the "simple" common ones.
There's also no well-defined meaning to a shrug or an eye-roll, but it's still a useful way of communicating emotion. Semantically, an emoji isn't used like a word. It's used like a gesture or facial expression. In practice, the message is usually quite clear — clearer, in fact, than if an emoji hadn't been used, since in the absence of tone-of-voice and body language text can itself create ambiguity.
> They mean different things to different subgroups, and act as an "in-group" credential in many cases.
Do you have an example of an emoji meaning different things to different groups? In my experience they have a pretty consistent meaning across our culture — even the more abstract ones, like an upside-down smile. The only barrier is "whether or not you're familiar with the typical meaning," and that's the case for any expression or colloquialism. If I say "they're like two peas in a pod" and you have no idea what that means, that doesn't mean it's an in-group signifier. Granted, familiarity with emojis correlates with age, but that's the same with any linguistic shift.
> They are visually very indistinct, and can be difficult to distinguish one from another for people who have less than perfect vision, or color-blindness.
I'm sure there are accessibility options which people can configure on their phones to minimize this. Large-text mode, for instance, or a high-contrast emoji font. Text itself is a medium which isn't very accessible to vision-impaired people, and we have developed solutions for that.
> For people with autism or other non-neurotypical processing they can be completely unintelligible, rendering the communication even less successful than "traditional" language.
Autistic people also have trouble understanding the meaning of facial expressions and of metaphors sometimes, but that doesn't mean that those shouldn't be used in conversation. It just means that everyone should know their audience.
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I don't think you've raised any serious practical issues — they seem to be all special cases, such as "what if you're talking to an autistic person or a blind person or an older person." Under those circumstances I would communicate differently, same as if I were speaking to a deaf person, or emailing a blind person, or talking to someone with poor English skills. There is no universally-viable way of communicating, but emoji typically reduce ambiguity and add layers of expression to a message, so in most cases they're a good choice.
I've expanded on my objections a bit in a sibling comment, but to address "/s": it doesn't have many of the emoji drawbacks.
It is literal shorthand for a well-defined word whose definition can be found. It is visually distinct, and follows the centuries of typographical design we use to acquire written symbols. And it refers to a well-known concept.
So I have no objection to it.
Of course there are some symbols which are easier to visually acquire, and seem to refer to well-defined concepts. But even the various smileys are unintelligible as to their meaning when taken as a group.
So once one gets off the basic "smiling face/thumbs up/thumbs down" subset I'd say it is a disaster for communication in a professional setting, and is exclusionary in a way that its proponents actually want it to be - as an in-group indicator that makes them feel a part of something that "others" are not.
