...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)