Emojis are simply non-verbal cues in online communication.

The argument

This position accepts that emojis are now everywhere in digital messaging but denies that ubiquity amounts to change. Emojis are a substitute for non-verbal cues in face to face communication, and their significance in digital messages is in clarifying meaning for the recipient. Speech carries tone, facial expression, timing and gesture alongside the words, and a reader of plain text receives none of it. Written digital communication had a gap where those signals should be, and emojis fill it. The evidence offered points in the same direction. A 2018 study into use and interpretation of emojis found that participants increasingly deployed emojis precisely for this reason: to reduce ambiguity within written communication. That finding is about function rather than volume. It says that when people reach for an emoji they are doing the work a raised eyebrow or a shift in tone would do in person, marking a remark as a joke, softening a request, or signalling a warmth the words alone leave open to misreading. The study's second finding closes the argument. Emojis bring clarity and nuance to messages, with recipients rarely misinterpreting emojis, which means they succeed at the task. That success is exactly why this position treats their impact as limited. A device that reliably transmits what a gesture would have transmitted is not creating a new form of expression; it is restoring an old one to a medium that had lost it. On this reading emojis are hardly changing the face of communication, but performing an existing communicative function in a new way, and the larger question answers itself: their effect is confined to communication, and even there it is conservative rather than transformative.

Context

Many psychological studies show that meaning is communicated largely through non-verbal cues. In 1971, a study by Albert Mehrabian indicated that the extent to which this was true was far higher than expected - with verbal communication accounting for just 7% of communication. Mehrabian's study revealed that the other 38% of this is vocal (i.e. based on intonation), and the majority - 55% - through body language. With so much of how we communicate therefore dependent on non-verbal cues, emojis are simply performing this role in written messages.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Emojis can be interpreted in different ways. The Unicode Consortium, which manages the introduction, removal and adaptation of 'official' emojis acknowledges this issue in their own guidelines. They state, emojis are 'encoded in Unicode based primarily on their general appearance, not on an intended semantic.' By virtue of their nature, any meaning given to emojis is flexible and open to misinterpretation. For example, historically many users have deployed the peach emoji to mean human buttocks. When this emoji was redrawn in 2016 to reduce its likeness to the human anatomy, a significant number of users complained to Apple that the critical 'second meaning' had been lost. Emojis are therefore non-verbal cues insofar as they add meaning to written communication. However, they do not perform the same role as body language or intonation, as they have no fixed meaning.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P2] Emojis do not have a fixed meaning, leaving recipients open to interpret the images in any way they choose