Emojis Are the Great Softener of Communication (20/30)
I’m writing 30 posts in 30 days, this is number 20.
The internet is a hostile place where your status as an accepted member of society can be taken from you if you touch certain sensitive subjects the wrong way. ❤️🤘🙏
It’s also where you share your passions, your aspirations, photos of your midriff, and plans for world domination, such that strangers can pass judgement on it. 🥵🤪😱
All of this without the basic ingredient required for civility: the presence of another living breathing human organism in front of you, there to remind you that we’re just a bunch of grown-up babies struggling to understand how to adapt to our local tidepool on this moss-covered ball of rock we live on. 👻😹👀
For many of us, this means we have two selves: the loving, humble, reasonable one in real life, and the self-serious, pretentious, anxious internet person, engaging in constant self-censure, self-curation, and circuitousness to avoid punishment and judgement. 👼👤🤙
We should treasure any internet communication tool that allows us to soften these edges, to recreate some of the best characteristics of real human communication—warmth, fluidity, and the potential for irony and sincerity to bolster each other. 🎃⚡️😉
The humble emoji can serve in this capacity, softening sentiments that could seem mean, adding heft to affection, and gesturing towards the playful ambiguity of real conversation—it takes us away from this tiresome delivery of labored coherence—these words upon words that, while conveying much miraculously well, also pigeonhole us into certain limited dimensions of identity. 🐣🌝🍙
There are those who insist, with a smug superiority, that the emoji isn’t serious communication, missing that this is the whole point of the emojic endeavor—the heart is not always serious, and, occasionally, it needs to escape from the black and white containers we put it in.❤️🧡💛💚💙
I was going to write a post about how inline emojis are an abomination, but thank you for putting them at the end of your text. It makes for a much smoother reading experience and allows me to tolerate the emojis more.