I’ve become fascinated by the emoji keyboard on the iPhone, especially now that iOS 6 comes with a wider range of options, including everything from the hilariously banal to the bafflingly bizarre to the surprisingly queer friendly. I thought, when I activated the emoji keyboard, that the novelty of inserting sheep and bread into text messages (“I loaf ewe”) would get old fast — but months later I still find myself tickled. Naturally, the language nerd in me wants to know why. What are the different linguistic ways we might use emoticons in text, and what makes them appealing?
Emoji as emotional shorthand. Using certain emoticons, like hearts or faces, sidesteps the issue of saying something just right. Sending your sweetheart a smiley face with hearts as eyes communicates, quite concisely, “Damn, I sure like you,” and with none of the awkward verbal gushiness. Sending a downtrodden face with mournful eyebrows communicates… well, a feeling that’s hard to put into words. Sometimes the human face speaks more clearly, even when it’s abstracted into a yellow ball.
Playing with language. Images of animals, food stuffs, cars, etc., are more about pleasure than shorthand. If someone asks how I’m getting to the grocery store, it takes me just as long to hunt down the red hatchback emoticon as it does to type “my car.” Writing “I like your new haircut” is easier than piecing together the dark-haired man emoji, the haircutting emoji, and the thumbs up emoji. But it’s a puzzle. And though emoji, by nature, replace the written with the visual, it’s a puzzle of language and syntax. It forces us to think about how we compose thoughts, and what are our distinct units of communication.
Coloring communication. We might also use emoticons to supplement writing, to give it a tone. Adding a smile to the end of an ambiguous sentence makes it playful; adding a wink makes it flirty. Add a shrimp tempura to a text about eating shrimp tempura and you have an illustration, giving the flat text of the message a vibrance through visual repetition. Whether we’re clarifying our communicative intentions or just spicing up our language, the nature of our message changes, though its textual content remains the same.
Speech acts. Other times, emoji aren’t about communication, they’re about actions. Bodily actions. In fact, they are bodily actions. If I send my friend a waving hand, I’m not illustrating the fact that I’m waving hello in real life, with my real hand. I’m only waving virtually, but I’m waving nonetheless. If I use the blowing-a-kiss emoji, I blow you a kiss. If I send a thumbs up, I give you a thumbs up. The act is in the text itself.
Gender performance. When you decide whether to use emoticons, or any form of communication, you make decisions about to present yourself. I’d love to conduct actually academic research on the correlation between emoji use and gender identification. I’m not just talking about who sends emoticons of dresses or footballs or other cultural stereotypes of femininity and masculinity. I’m talking about using emoji at all. My instinct is that emoticons, as speech markers, are feminizing, a subconscious way of enacting girliness — or at least they read that way. That goes for traditional ASCII art emoji. Watch the iEmoji Twitter feed, for example, and you’ll see many more female faces than male.
Surreal art making. For me, the most fun way to use the iPhone emoji keyboard is just to frickin’ bang on it. Pick a bunch of random images, hit send, and POOF, instant surrealist collage. Oddly disparate markers come together to form absurd combinations. Of course, even when a string of emoticons has been selected at random, we still try to make semantic sense of these illogical little visual sentences. Any number of new creatures could come to life this way: the pig-fish, the rocket-cake. The result is exuberant, playful, and refreshingly uninterested in successful communication.
Pig-fish-rocket-cake blast off!
