The Trouble with Emoji

I know several wonderful people involved with the process of creating new emoji and occasionally see them celebrating an addition. I understand the motivation for representing more people, such as the recent addition of interskintone couples. And yet, each time I cringe a bit – not about the specifics, but about emoji generally.

Written languages based on alphabets are one of the great human accomplishments. They mark an extraordinary progress over the hieroglyphs which preceded them. Alphabets are kind of magical. First, you can express different languages using the same alphabet (e.g. German, English, French, Spanish and more). Second, you can introduce new words simply by combining the existing letter of the alphabet. Both of these demonstrate that alphabets have a kind of universal quality about them. Third, and maybe most important, words assembled from an alphabet represent a high level of abstraction that allows a lot of the detail to be filled in. That is an important feature, not a bug.

For example, when I write the word “human” you can fill in what you imagine a human to look like. The word itself carries some fundamental attributes of being a human but the rest is intentionally underspecified. This allows us to use a single word that applies independent of gender, nationality, race, clothing, etc. That is the power of language based on alphabets, because the letters themselves carry no meaning. Even the meaning of a word can evolve over time. For example, the word “couple” at one point might have meant a male-female couple but is now used to describe any two people who are paired.

Contrast that with emoji. The need to add ever more representations arises exactly because images lack this universality. Emoji have color and shape and hairstyle and clothing and so on. A detailed emoji thus emphasizes the specifics over the abstract. The specifics are directly visually encoded and have meaning in and of themselves (unlike letters) and the overall meaning of the image is also permanent. This problem of specificity has gotten worse as emoji have become more detailed, which has created the understandable desire for representation. The more something is a detailed image, the more it either does or does not look like someone specific.

It is worth recalling that emoji were predated by emoticons, which is a portmanteau of emotion and icon. They played an important role in environments where short text fragments were common, such as online forums (remember dial-up bulletin boards?). There they served to provide emotional context that might otherwise get lost in a short text — something that seems highly relevant again today. But because they too were text based they had a high level of abstraction and did not suffer from the specificity problem of today’s graphically detailed emoji.

Am I just an old men yelling at clouds? Possibly. But consider the alternative for a moment that there really is a thin line between adding some emotional context to your text and regressing to the age of hieroglyphs. Wouldn’t it then be better to err on the side of not using emoji? Or maybe sticking to hearts, fire and vegetables?