Decay of Our Society
Words. That’s essentially what we use to communicate. But with advent of the internet, cellular phones, and now smartphones, tablets, etc, we’ve seen a massive shift in the way people communicate. Who do i blame? Shigetaka Kurita and Willem Van Lancker. Emoji are the decay of our society, destroying the very fabric of human society — human interactivity.
Emoji. Bad enough people use so many different short forms and acronyms. Emojis or emoticons or stickers, all of them trying to replace the words we use. While some simple ones are effective, there isn’t a real standard. With smartphone manufacturers wanting to stand out from the rest, they tend to look different on every different brand’s device. Not only do they look different, like short forms and acronyms, sometimes, people give them meanings that aren’t universal.
The best part is, it’s pretty much the same fixed number of emoji but with different artistic treatment. Am sure everyone knows someone who has thoroughly abused emoji. Some have gone to the extent of typing out songs in emoji. Creative as that may be, looking at some of those examples in the Buzzfeed article, it clearly drives people crazy. Why are we still doing this?
To be fair, yes, it is rather fun to use them once in a while and it saves time typing out “I’m laughing so hard until i’m crying with actual tears of joy running down my face” by using 1 emoji. So it has a place in the world and it’s a time save for us, since we’re now in such an “instant gratification” society where we want everything now. However, when someone told me this emoji to the left meant “don’t know if i should laugh or cry”, that’s where i draw the line.
A picture paints a thousand words. Though emoji were thought to be simply — universal, they clearly aren’t. They mean different things to different people. Already with text, one can hardly read or be certain of emotions, therefore to have to decipher an emoji in a conversation is just silly. Don’t we actually have proper conversations anymore?
So i’m not saying to drop emoji completely, but let’s use emoji responsibly. As if our lives aren’t complicated enough, there’s a wiki for emoji. As more emojis arise soon enough, for whatever reasons, we need instant gratification to summarize our words so it’s easier to convey a message, or just to be racially diverse, let’s not forget that we are ultimately human, and the spoken word or proper words are still very much treasured.
P.S. Do not include them in professional emails. It’s not an emoji that makes you human, it’s what you say that makes you human. Words.
