“Why wouldn’t you engage in the same way someone is engaging you?”

“It’s all about context,”

is a perfect summation of how I use emojis. And all of them are text based in a very narrow field of text-based conversations I have. For example, I'm not going to use any of them on hubski, because here I am writing. There is dialogue between people, but it's not usually in the form of a conversation. It doesn't read the same way, and it's a back and forth. Turn-based strategy, in a way, as opposed to texting someone or IMing, which is real-time, conversation. Here I have space and time to be verbose in everything I say, while in text it's usually a very short sentence or message, which as the message gets shorter, the tone is less clear. So in text, emojis can take the place of body language and facial expression.

I've never been able to use emojis like what I think this article is talking about, but my lexicon of them consists entirely of these six text based ones: xD, ouo, u3u, D:, :3, and :3c

And it comes back to that first quote, of engaging who you engage with. I use all of these when messaging arguewithatree because they're easy and they get a point across, but we read each of those emojis differently, based on how we know that person. When I see an 'xD' in the wild, it doesn't mean the same thing to me as it does when Chelsea says it, they are different people, using different facial expressions, essentially. The base idea is still there and intelligible, but it's not universal. Even something simple like a smile-- :) -- can be sincere, condescending, sarcastic, joking, or the fake-smile-while-crying-inside type. Context, audience, personality are all there.

Of course these are things I only use with one person, because they're the only person I speak to at a high enough speed and regularity in digital media that it makes sense for. It gets brutally embarrassing in cases like dudes trying to flirt on OKC or Tinder using the ;P face at every turn, but when I see friends using emojis, like those on twitter or vine, I don't see it necessarily as a form of communication. It's more of a bit of silliness and fun, am I wrong? Nobody is out there using them as if these things are clarifying messages, or in place of words, but to just brighten messages and such.

I fail to see where gender comes into the equation though. How is masculinity affected by the use of these things? Is it another case of toxic masculinity attempting to mask all emotions? In which case, we should be fighting that idea away as much as possible. There's no value to 'hide your emotions to be a man.'