The Emoji-fication of Emotion
Reclaim your miserable articulation.
We’re deep in the rancid, digital guts of it all.
If there’s one thing guaranteed to give me that low-level, fizzing nausea – the sort you get after accidentally inhaling a lungful of wet dog, it’s the sight of a poorly chosen emoji.
We’ve done it, haven’t we? We’ve finally boiled down the vast, screaming, horrible complexity of the human interior – that glorious, miserable, cathedral-sized mess of fear, love, and crippling self-loathing – and reduced it to a handful of tiny, pixellated yellow heads.
It’s the Emoji-fication of Emotion. And if that doesn’t sound like the title of an incredibly depressing academic textbook, I don’t know what does.
We can be staring into the middle distance, contemplating the sheer, desolate pointlessness of our existence, the fact that our life is essentially a long, slow journey towards becoming just another lump of slightly used meat, and how do we communicate this existential gut-punch? With a single, blithely simple pictogram. The Grimacing Face 😬. Or perhaps the slightly sweatier, deeply misleading Anxious Face with Sweat 😅.
It’s shorthand. It’s laziness draped in the cheap, flimsy fabric of convenience. It’s the conversational equivalent of giving up on making a decent cup of tea and just chewing on a dry tea bag instead.
Why bother wrestling with the awkward, sticky truth of human feeling when you can just drop a yellow button into the chat? A tiny image of a smiling turd is apparently sufficient to convey your opinion on the latest government omni-shambles. And it is an omni-shambles, by the way. Everything is.
The problem that’s like finding a slug in your sandwich, is that this is where the machines step in. AI, that ever-growing, humming cloud of silicon inevitability, is brilliant at this. Better than us, actually.
It can analyse the words, the tone, the sheer, crushing mediocrity of your message, and instantly recommend the perfect little image. “Ah, you have just expressed mild disappointment at the price of biscuits. I suggest the Crying Face 😭 for maximum, effect, followed by the Money-Mouth Face 🤑 to convey the predatory nature of late-stage capitalism. There. Conversation complete.”
And we, the feeble, exhausted remnants of Homo sapiens, just accept it. Because it’s easy. It’s a shortcut past the difficult, necessary work of actually stringing a few meaningful words together. It’s designed to save you the seven seconds it would take to type: “Well, that’s an utter load of old rubbish, isn’t it? I feel a bit gutted, frankly.”
This is where you, dear reader, and I, the bitter, slightly clammy columnist, stage our tiny, pointless act of rebellion. The AI will offer the convenience. It’s holding out the simple, clean, easily digestible Thumbs Up 👍 for a successful conclusion to an otherwise miserable situation.
Refuse it.
When the machine begs for the efficiency of the pictogram, you give it verbiage. You give it the grotesque, rambling, regional truth. You reclaim the difficult, verbose reality of your feelings.
Imagine the situation: Your boss has just cancelled your holiday due to a totally unforeseen, easily preventable scheduling cock-up. The AI suggests the Angry Face 😠.
Your reply, your glorious, defiant anti-emoji:
“Well, I’ll tell you what, that’s left me feeling proper mardy, hasn’t it? Right vexed, you know. I’m utterly gobsmacked by the sheer cack-handedness of that manoeuvre. I feel like a soggy, forgotten sock on the radiator of life, just slowly desiccating with a faint, low-level pong of despair, and I’m fair spitting feathers about it. Honestly, it’s all gone completely pear-shaped, leaving me feeling less than chuffed, like I’ve been utterly clobbered with a damp tea towel. I’m properly narked.”
See? No little yellow face required. Just a perfectly constructed, deeply felt slab of pure, antiquated misery. It’s inconvenient. It’s rambling. It’s a pain in the arse to type. And that, dear reader, is the whole bleeding point.
Reclaim your miserable articulation. The machines may inherit the Earth, but we can, for a glorious, brief moment, refuse to speak their sanitised, graphic shorthand.
Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, you self-optimising algorithm.