The Dilemma Of 😭 Vs 😂

By Tapasmi Ray Chaudhuri (UG25), Illustration by Kabir Singhania (UG25)

By Kabir Singhania

Have you caught yourself erasing 😭 while replying to your grandmother’s 14th WhatsApp forward? Gassed up your friends with the 😏💯🔥💦😩 combo when they drop a fire fit pic? Maybe you’ve silenced your friend’s jokes that didn’t land with a patronizing😂😂😂. Or maybe none of these apply to you, and you use these little pictures the way they were intended to be used because you’re not chronically online. These colourful additions to our texting repertoire can tell us some interesting things about ourselves and the way we interact with each other in the current digital space.

Emojis were supplements to language at some point, indicating tone, conveying humour, and filling up gaps in text. They still are — but in some ways, they’ve become something of a language of their own. It might be puzzling to think that something as seemingly straightforward as an emoji could have varying interpretations. Think back to 4th grade English class — don’t emojis serve as ‘homonyms’ now too? That is, words that look the same but have multiple meanings. What gives rise to these different meanings? What is it about this new language that makes you think twice before hitting send on a message you’re sending to your mom, your bestie, or your boss?

I sent out a survey trying to get some data on just that. With 70 responses from varying age groups ranging from 18 to late 50s, there are some interesting patterns that can be found. It should be noted, however, that this survey is limited by its small sample size and its isolation to formally educated English-literate populations.

Some things remained true across the board. 93.8% of respondents claimed to use emojis very often / often, regardless of variation in age. The ubiquitous nature of this non-verbal language is well established. All of them admitted to altering the way they use emojis depending on the recipient. 80% said they used these with sarcastic or ironic intent most of the time. The role emojis play in their conversations can be boiled down to three primary ones selected by the vast majority: adding humour, indicating tone, and convey what cannot be expressed through words alone.

It’s the questions about the irony behind the usage of emojis where things get a little more interesting. I displayed some gifs and emojis that carry the connotation of ironic humour when popularly used on social media such as twitter and Instagram, and asked the respondent whether they found it amusing, unfunny, or whether they could detect any element of humour in them at all. While the weighted average of most elements (namely screen time, frequency of emoji usage, and preferred social media) among age groups did not exhibit vastly significant variation, ‘ironic’ humour and appreciation of it was predominantly exhibited by the 18–21 age range, followed by the 22–24 age range, followed by the 25–30 and 30+ age range.

At least according to this survey, you’re safest to use your 😭💀 to indicate laughter to younger peers, because older populations gravitated towards labelling them as indications of ‘genuine sadness,’ and ‘death’ respectively. So, maybe stick to 😂 in the family group chat.

But even if we’ve collected data to support it, that’s not new news. Everybody, regardless of whether they resonated with ‘ironic’ humour, showed a unanimous agreement on the fact that emojis have evolved over time in terms of the meanings they convey. What’s interesting here is the dynamic nature of emojis themselves.

On a neurophysiological level, emojis are just another visual stimulus. Your brain processes the little yellow image, firing neurons in parts of the brain that process emotions and form associations based on real expressions they see on people until a decision-making process is employed to select it once it is deemed fit to convey the standard emotion one would associate it with. The variation in perception that challenges this ‘standard’ must therefore arise from variation in the way we are socialized to interact with these non-verbal cues. It seems reasonable, in that case, given the disparity of emoji interpretation among age groups, to isolate factors that are exclusive to meme-loving, post-irony-appreciating Gen Z.

The youngest age groups partaking in the survey were some of the first to have grown up in a world dominated by the internet from the beginning. The vernacular associated with social media has had about as much time to be nurtured in our brains as our mother tongues and regional languages. Simply by virtue of the time period in which we happened to spawn, we got passes to the exclusive clique that is the internet, and by extension, social media. The desire of social approval through engaging with the blossoming ironic humour of the Internet is a novel and arousing one.

But with the subconscious desire to co-opt into a group of any sort comes the alienation of those who don’t, or can’t. Emojis are just an example of non-verbal communication cues, which as a mode of communication is inherently vulnerable to subjective interpretations and by extension, misinterpretations. The multi-faceted emotions conveyed by facial expressions are commonly reported as confusing by those on the autism spectrum. Those who do not interact with the vernacular-generating circles on the internet lack the exposure to adopt this ironic mode of communication. Generations that did not have internet lingo as relevant a pillar in their semantic skill formation stages too are alienated from this not-so-secret secret language. It is likely that it is by virtue of the exclusivity of ironic internet humour that it has become a relevant topic of discussion in the first place- created by and consumed by the niche group whose age, privilege of internet access, sense of humour, and media consumption happen to overlap and form the interacting demographic of meme culture.

Like any desirable behaviour we observe in others, one may internalize and imitate that behaviour through observational learning, positively reinforced when we are rewarded by being recognised as someone who is part of this clique. Do you hear that? It’s the sound of dopamine. It’s like getting noticed by the popular kids in school, but on a scale that has the power to influence Internet users across the world, to shape forms of non-verbal communication to billions, to alter the path of language evolution in the ever-growing digital space. All from a little smiling yellow ball.

Works Cited:

Logothetis, N. K., & Sheinberg, D. L. (1996). Visual object recognition. Annual review of neuroscience, 19(1), 577–621.

Argyle, M. (1972). Non-verbal communication in human social interaction. Non-verbal communication, 2(1).

Celani, G., Battacchi, M. W., & Arcidiacono, L. (1999). The understanding of the emotional meaning of facial expressions in people with autism. Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 29, 57–66.