With the advent of smartphones and affordable internet connections, digital communication has become an inevitable part of our routine life. The invention of the telephone was thought to bring an end to the reign of written communication, and for a while, it did bring down the sheer volume of letters we send and receive. But text messaging platforms like Whatsapp, Snapchat and other social media applications has reinstated the love for words in the new gen. However, this time around, written communication didn’t just comprise of words alone, but also emojis.
Emoticons were first introduced in the 1980s as a smiley face using punctuations ‘:-)’. Later in the 1990s, emojis became a popular trend among youngsters worldwide, starting from Japan. And it has reached such a stage that currently 92% of the people online use emojis. So, what makes these ‘pictures in texts’ so popular among the commonwealth?
It was in 2017, that scientists started to seriously think about the influence of emoticons in our daily life. And since then, there has been a lot of research in this area. As we all know, emojis add a subtle emotional layer to our communications. They simulate some aspects of face to face communication. But it was only recently that we got to know why. fMRI studies on the issue have concluded that the brain areas responsible for identifying facial expressions and non-verbal cues also light up when responding to an emoji. In theory, there is not much difference between seeing a loved one smile right in front of you and seeing a smiley face emoji that person has sent. So, emojis aren’t just communication shortcuts to save our time, but it is also as close as we can get to intimacy through written communication.
