Use your emojination: the cultural politics of modern messaging

Anyone with half a brain and a smartphone (which is to say, a brain and a half) knows that modern society celebrates the emoji as a mode of expression that is visual, experiential, and succinct like nothing else. Emoji popularity is so widespread that last year, it was almost no surprise to see the laughing-so-hard-I-am-crying face become the first pictograph featured as Oxford Dictionaries “Word of the Year.”

The emoji is versatile. Texters, tweeters, Facebookers, and the like use emojis to relieve typed phrases from their prior Helvetica lackluster. Emojis enhance posts and messages with emotive specificity while maintaining a casual concision—a difficult feat to achieve with words alone. At the same time, emojis are meant to be generalizable. Despite the ever-expanding library of images and variations, the car emoji, for example, isn’t an exact representation of every car a person may be envisioning. Similarly, no smiley-winky face can stand for everyone’s smile-wink. There are flirty winks and knowing grandfather winks, among countless others. Many people don’t even have the physical capability of winking (or, for that matter, perfectly round yellow cartoon faces). In this sense, despite some impressive pieces of emoji storytelling and examples of systematic structure in picture order, mainstream emoji use seems more like elaborate punctuation than a separate language. In other words, emojis may be understandably crude since they also work as lighthearted shortcuts.

However, as ubiquitous as they might seem to their most avid users, emojis are surrounded by ongoing sociopolitical debate. Who and what the emoji keyboard represents—and what it perhaps fails to represent—constantly evolves as the subject of heated discourse. By no means is the universality of emojis agreed-upon. Apple responded to criticisms bemoaning their lack of emoji diversity by adding variable skin tone options. But, while some rejoiced at seeing their “thumbs up” dinner plan confirmation look closer to the winter-washed beige of their actual hand, the new skin color gradient failed to appease others. In a NPR piece from February 25, 2015, Kat Chow engages Oju Africa CEO Alpesh Patel, who argues that the update mistakes color for cultural diversity. In 2014, his company released a set of “Afro-centric” emojis in response to demands for more culturally comprehensive options. Additional requests from emoji users call for a wider array of world cuisines and country flags.

While some may raise an eyebrow at emojicentric sociopolitical turmoil, the importance of cultural competency in a widely used form of messaging should not be understated. While it’s true that emoji can enhance the meaning of a phrase, such enhancement is limited by the images themselves and their potential for cultural interpretation by both senders and receivers. This is critical, because what emojis do and do not currently communicate holds ramifications in modern politics. For example, a tool now available on The Atlantic’s website tracks Twitter’s live feed to compile emojis being used to describe the presidential candidates in real-time: stars, cameras, flames, whirlwinds, laughing-crying faces, and American flags flit across the update bar above the most commonly tweeted pictures associated with each candidate. This seems like a harmless convergence of millennial-ism and election hype, or even a possible tool to spark civic interest among newer generations of voters.

However, assuming emojis do have some qualities that lend them to universal interpretation—at least among certain American-mobile-social-media-using demographics—a kind of simplicity could overshadow real political discourse with shortcuts. Given that some of the most popular emojis convey general ethos rather than precision (namely positivity, negativity, or some form of ambivalence), using emojis without context as barometers of political opinion may have unintended consequences. For instance, the fist-in-the-air emoji communicates determination for a cause, but devoid of background knowledge or impetus to pursue a candidate’s platform further, such association may place broad labels on specific issues. At the same time, emoji interpretation can vary even among those within similar cultural and geographical demographics. Does a flame mean she’s “on fire,” or “going down in flames?” What can we make of the hand-on-the-chin pensive face—hard thinker, or stumped? In today’s digital landscape of overstimulation and shortening attention spans, we should be more careful about the shortcuts we offer, as they exacerbate the broad ideological strokes that polarize American politics.

Again, it might seem overanalytical to read this campaign stunt as more than a stab at youth appeal. But one need not be a doomsayer touting fear of lingual overtake by emojispeak to consider the political and cultural ramifications of giving emojis credibility in political discourse. Though relatable communication is a worthy endeavor, politicians and the general citizenry alike ought to consider to whom they relate, how they relate, and what it means to simplify citizen perspectives to a set of tiny pictures made by someone else.