I’m an old-fashioned guy, and I believe in words—verbal communication. I had read Herman Melville’s Moby Dick twice by the time I was out of high school. I’m also the only guy I know not some-kind of minister who has read the Bible twice. I read it once out of curiosity while I was still in high school and once in college as part of a two-semester course in Christianity and the Bible.
My college major was English literature for good reason. I have no particular objection to “pictures,” including those in comic books (I read a lot of them when I was young) and emoji. I have made more than one obscene gesture in my lifetime (I’ll bet there are corresponding emoji), and I agree that a picture can often be worth 1000 words.
I’m a big fan of language, and although I like the visual arts including emoji, I wouldn’t trade all the emoji in the world for a single good narrative. Our ancient ancestors painted on the walls of caves to celebrate successful hunters, and every civilization of which I am aware used visual images to immortalize their heroes, battles won and lost, and achievements. Oral histories tell the stories. At first, oral histories were exactly that: oral.
Homer’s Long poems, including the Iliad and Odyssey, were memorized by those who wanted to tell the tale. Few could read in those days, so their entertainment consisted of listening to poets tell the well-known stories. Homer was one of the best at retelling the stories, so he got the credit.
The visual arts, including emoji, have a role to play, of course. When I was young, I read hundreds of comic books, from Walt Disney‘s stories to the Classic Comics that retold famous stories in comic-book form. In some ways, emoji are substitutes for what would be a longer, more labor-intensive expression of an idea. I am not against emoji per se, but I consider them an incomplete substitute for a verbal description. Sometimes an emoji is enough, but sometimes it’s not.
Consider your favorite work of literature. (I assume that because you’re reading this, you have a favorite work of literature.) I was an English major, so I have many favorites, but I’ve already mentioned Moby Dick, so we can use that as an example. The whiteness of the whale is symbolic of its evil nature.
White is, of course, typically used to convey innocence and purity, and Melville’s intent is to amplify the evil by having the whale that destroys sailing vessels and their crews be white. Melville wrote to his friend Nathanial Hawthorne that he had written a “wicked book,” that uses white as the symbol for evil. Try doing that with an emoji….
If you have read Moby Dick or any of the classics of English literature (or of any literature that’s been translated into English), you can imagine the difficulty of expressing the same ideas using emoji. This is, of course, not to say that emoji are bad or that they do not have their purposes. I can’t imagine that Dickens or Melville would have chosen to add one (or many) to their novels, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have a role to play in modern communication.
Debra pointed out (and illustrated) a number of uses for emoji. They do indeed add an emotional component to otherwise straight-forward text. If you have studied NLP (Neurolinguistic Programming), you know that people use all three major forms of communication (visual, auditory, and kinesthetic) with regularity. Written communication relies on visual input, but the written words have auditory equivalents. And sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words.