The modern Hieroglyph: Communicating with Images
Carla Rotenberg
At this moment in time we have 3304 emojis (May 2020, Unicode). These little pictographs were first designed in the 1990s in Japan and have since 2010, the year the organisation Unicode initiated a global standard for emoji, flooded our online conversations (Pardes “The Wired Guide to Emoji”). They have provided us with new ways to connect globally 🌍 and express our feelings 😊. Emojis have become a representation of our global community and though we may believe we hold power over them, the longer we live in an emoji world joined by new generations each year, the more they gain power over us. As anthropologist Daniel Miller explains, the material and visual world we are born into, inevitably influences our ways of thinking and our behaviour. At the same time, emojis risk adding to our image pollution, the vast amount of images we are confronted with every day. In his prominent book The Society of the Spectacle (1967) French theorist Guy Debord analysed how this pollution makes us loose touch with reality and turns us into passive figures. There are limitations and opportunities in our expression through Emoji: it has to constantly readapt itself in order to offer an accurate world image and ensure real communication, that has a positive impact on ourselves and our behaviour.
“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world”, wrote the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (74). Even though it is debatable if Emoji should be considered a language, it has in fact become a global means of communication that aims to express and represent anyone, across cultures and ages. Thus Wittgenstein’s problem with language applies just as much to Emoji: There is a limit to what we can represent with emojis, and the things it leaves out are officially not acknowledged, therefore not part of the global community.
Limitations can help us to not get lost in a confusing overflow of symbols, but they become especially problematic in a global context, when they leave out cultures or create a hierarchy between them and we start believing that this is our reality.
This is problematic since the use of emojis expands at a faster pace than Emoji adapts its limits to every culture and identity. Different to words, these limitations are not only set by the terms themselves, but by the committee Unicode that decides what and how we can express ourselves in Emoji. In consequence, up to 2015 there were no coloured people or women working and playing sports in the world of Emoji (Pardes “The Wired Guide to Emoji”). This has since then been changed, but other regulations were put in place on purpose. In 2016 Apple, later followed by other companies, replaced the gun emoji with a water pistol as a sign of anti violence (Morby). In this case, the limit is intended to educate the user. But what does this mean for the representation of the world Emoji offers? Do people not have guns? Is there no violence?
Though the gun may be a controversial example, it would surely be argued as a part of culture for some Emoji users. What is key to Emoji is consistently updating itself. While we still are restricted by Unicode’s regulations, anyone can propose a new emoji. Organisations such as Emojination fight for a more accurate representation on our Emoji keyboard. They successfully passed the hijab 🧕🏻 or the dumpling emoji 🥟. Activist Florie Hutchinson passed the ballerina shoe 🥿, that might seem like an unnecessary addition considering there are six other ways to say “shoe” in emoji: 👞👟👠👡👢🥾 (Pardes “The newest emoji says as much about us as actual words”). Yet a shoe is not just a shoe: while a flat ballerina may be associated with comfortable, feminine, working footwear, a red high heel may imply leisure time or even eroticism. And just as our material world is composed by a diversity of same things with different cultural meanings (Miller 42–78), our representation of it should follow the same rules. If Emoji wants to create an accurate representation of our world that influences us positively, it has to be questioned constantly and increased in its terms, amplifying our worldview.
Wittgenstein was probably not thinking about emojis, when he concluded in his book that “[w]e make to ourselves pictures from facts” (28). By this he was referring to our way of communicating with words that are translated by the receiver into images. Very often those images are not the ones the communicator intended and thus lead to miscommunication. Wittgenstein did however think of hieroglyphic writing “which pictures the facts it describes” (qtd. in Jespersen and Reintges 1). A comparison between emoji and hieroglyphs reveals how this form of communication is not at all a new trend (Kershner). We are regaining ancient methods of communication where words have failed us.
Emoji can help with this threat of miscommunication, but it also threatens to construct an illusion. Consisting mainly of nouns, emojis express especially two things: feelings and materialised concepts. For the communicating of the first one, emojis can be of great help and add a whole layer of meaning (Stefan). Writing “I’m okay ☺️” or “I’m okay 😐” changes our whole tone of voice. Suddenly we can express hidden feelings, irony and sarcasm digitally.
This possibility to express ourselves can, on the other hand, entail the threat of artificially constructing ourselves. If we are honest, most times no one is crying waterfalls 😭 or laughing so much that tears pop out of their eyes 😂.
In the end each emoji is another image that contributes to the image we want to transmit of ourselves, which is usually that we are funny, loving people (probably the reason why the heart and the laughing emoji are ranked first in frequency (Unicode May 2020)). Due to the lack of nonverbal communication, as body language or real tone of voice, the threat of emoji is, that we alternate the facts we then picture. This would construct an illusion of an overly emotional digital community, forgetting about the mostly serious faces behind the screens and losing touch with reality. When it comes to the expression of concepts however, these constructed emoji images can help us explain and picture facts for anyone on the planet and this may be one of the biggest strengths it has. An example for this are the emojis by the Swedish organisation BRIS explaining situations of abuse that make it easier for children to reach out (56 % more children did according to Garbergs). Or the Mosquito emoji 🦟 that became a global symbol for fighting Malaria (Pardes “The newest emoji says as much about us as actual words”). In these cases Emoji can communicate in a way words can’t, because of the difficulties in formulation or the limited global reach. The familiarity and attachment we have to emojis should be an opportunity to further improve and add to our flows of communication and reduce the risk of superficiality and illusion.
Considering this — how successfully can we communicate through images, in this case emojis? There is a limitation to what we can express due to external restrictions (Unicode committee) and internal restrictions (limits of the image itself). This is especially problematic when our visual language, the supposable representation of our material world, fails to represent accurately and informs behaviour and beliefs in a negative way. Furthermore when communicating with images, we risk constructing an illusion of ourselves and others, confusing it with reality and becoming alienated. To succeed, Emoji cannot live as a final, static project. It needs to be questioned and updated constantly, both in its terms/images, as in the messages it sends. It cannot replace words, but it can add to situations where words fail us, reducing miscommunication and encouraging more communication between very different people, leading future generations to think and act in a beneficial way. The limits of our world would not be erased, but amplified continuously. Thus what we should always bear in mind when creating for a long-term and honest relationship to communication through the material and visual world is: it should be a never-ending design process.
