Dealing with Your Emojis

By SAM URETSKY

Remember ¢? It was the “cents” sign, standard on typewriters and the upper right corner of comic books (all in color for a dime). It’s gone now, mostly, although you can still find it among the symbols on word processing programs along with the Greek, Hebrew and Cyrillic alphabets. There’s an excellent discussion of the disappearance of the cents sign at charlieanderson.com. It reduces to, “In the 1960s a disparate group of American computer manufacturers (basically, everyone but IBM) got together and agreed on an encoding standard that became known as ASCII (“ass-key” — The American Standard Code for Information Interchange).” After all, why write 25¢ when you can always write $0.25?  In other words, “To err is human, but to really foul things up you need a committee.” Although even that classic phrase has been changed to “you need a computer.”

Computers brought us emoticons: C<: and 0-; which had to be looked at sideways to be understood, if they could be understood at all. ¯\_( )_/¯

From this came emojis, 3,521of them in the Unicode Standard as of October 2020, although more are added every year. Each year on July 17, Emojipedia (emojipedia.org) hosts the World Emoji Awards. The organization also offers statistics on emoji use, such as “ Loudly Crying Face has dethroned Face with Tears of Joy as Twitter’s top emoji” and “Pleading Face experienced surging popularity.”  This seems to reflect the world of COVID-19, inflation, drought and international tensions for the past year.  There is also increased use of the syringe emoji, although hopefully this is associated with having received the second dose of COVID-19 vaccine. Even so, according to one study, the most widely used emojis symbolized love and happiness:  Face with Tears of Joy, Red Heart, Smiling Face with Heart-Eyes, and Rolling on the Floor Laughing. Taken together it feels like a chorus of “We Shall Overcome.”

In 2016, Advances in Language and Literary Studies published a report, “Are Emojis Creating a New or Old Visual Language for New Generations? A Socio-semiotic Study.” The abstract asks, “The increasing use of emojis, digital images that can represent a word or feeling in a text or email, and the fact that they can be strung together to create a sentence with real and full meaning raises the question of whether they are creating a new language amongst technologically savvy youth, or devaluing existing language.” The author notes, “... emojis are devices for demonstrating tone, intent and feelings that would normally be conveyed by non-verbal cues in personal communications but which cannot be achieved in digital messages.” They are the computer replacement for facial expressions and body language.

The number of scientific studies of emojis has increased, perhaps because of studies showing that emoji analysis may be more useful than traditional methods of sentiment analysis. Sentiment analysis, also known as “opinion mining,” attempts to analyze the ways ideas are expressed in order to determine the underlying opinion, whether it’s a toothpaste, light beer, or a political candidate. For example, “I Like Ike” was clear cut, while “(X) is a worthy candidate” is less certain. A 2018 study, “Twitter Sentiment Analysis via Bi-sense Emoji Embedding and Attention-based LSTM (long short-term memory network)” suggested that analyzing emojis may be more reliable than examining word choices at determining how the person really feels.

A fascinating study of international emoji usage, “An empirical study of emoji usage on Twitter in linguistic and national contexts” appeared in the journal Online Social Networks and Media (24, 2021). The researchers from USC, studied emoji use in 30 languages over a month. The importance is that emojis, while following distinct national patterns, are a sort of universal language. One of their less surprising discoveries is “there are also hints that not all emojis are equal. Intuitively, we observe this in everyday communication (at least on social media) by the heavy presence of the (smiley face) or other symbols … (the red heart). “Emojies have taken the place of facial expressions and body language.

But while emojis may be the esperanto of the future, they require a universal broadband system to move beyond a language for tech savvy millennials, and in too many countries either lack of infrastructure, or the presence of excessive government control prevents widespread adoption. Even in the United States the pandemic lockdown demonstrated the limitations of our communications. The Biden infrastructure plan calls for $100 billion for an eight-year infrastructure plan, calling high-speed connections “the new electricity” that’s now a necessity for all Americans. (Crossed fingers).

Sam Uretsky is a writer and pharmacist living in Louisville, Ky. Email sdu01@outlook.com.

From The Progressive Populist, August 15, 2021

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