From NYT's new Men's Style section. Not sure how to feel about this.
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.'“Why wouldn’t you engage in the same way someone is engaging you?”
“It’s all about context,”
...so those are emoticons. The discussion at hand is emoji. Emoticons have been acceptable at some level for pushing 20 years, largely because of the lack of context within online communication. Emoji, on the other hand, evolved in Japan because it's an ideogrammatical language that did not lend itself well to character-based emoticons. Because of this, their employment by Western audiences is a lot more idiosyncratic. I get what you're saying but there's a difference. Me? I've pushed beyond. Recognizing that we live in a world of memes, emoticons, emoji, snapchat, instagram and random bullshit copy-pasted into our MMS, I went whole hog and installed bitmoji. AND I DON'T GIVE A FUCK THAT I'M A GROWN-ASS MAN. Because as you say, context - and if I'm contextually somewhere that I can act like a ritalin-addicted tween, I'll fuckin' do it. (And I was introduced to this hell by a producer in his mid 30s, FFS, who picked it up from his girlfriend who is in PR so there was a long line of people who oughtta know better who brought us to this place)
"ouo" is apparently eyes-with-a-smile (think o_o but with lips curving). "u3u" I couldn't find on google exactly -- I did see "o3o" but unfortunately I was unable to figure out exactly what it meant. The 3 seems to be puckered lips? Why are they sideways? That's wrong. I've encountered xD and :D in the wild, and I've always been told that :3 was a catface but now I'm beginning to question my knowledge. Yeah, anyway. I was going to ask what the hell they meant but I decided I could plausibly do the research on my own.
I'm really not one to over-express myself using emoticons or emojis, but I can say with absolute certainty that these: have made my life objectively better.
I once used a :) while texting my brother. i was almost immediately called out by him for it.
From Github's "how to write the perfect pull request" There is obviously a time and a place, but I can ensure you that one of the best guys I work with uses emojis consistently. He's a highly successful, 40-ish guy and a great manager and programmer.Use emoji to clarify tone. Compare “:sparkles: :sparkles: Looks good :+1: :sparkles: :sparkles:” to “Looks good.”
I still use ':)' and ':P' occasionally when I've written something that might mean different things depending on the tone you read it in. "Oh, fuck you :P" is in much less danger of being misinterpreted with the emoticon. Most people I say that kind of thing to now will usually know what I mean without them, so I very rarely have a need for them. As for the graphical emoji, the only use I've ever found for them has been having my bash prompt emit a 💩 if the last command returned a nonzero exit status, and 👻 if the working directory doesn't exist.