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Adam Sternbergh

Smile, You’re Speaking Emoji

Adam Sternbergh is a journalist and contributing editor at New York Magazine and Vulture and the former culture editor of the New York Times Magazine. As an author, his Shovel Ready, a dystopian novel set in New York City, was a Newsweek Favorite Book of 2014 and a Booklist Best Crime Novel and Best Crime Debut of 2014. The novel was also nominated for a 2015 Edgar Award for Best First Novel by an American. Sternbergh grew up in Toronto and currently lives with his family in Brooklyn. In the following article, which appeared in the November 17, 2014, issue of New York Magazine, Sternbergh examines the reasons why emoji have become such a popular form of communication.

AS YOU READ: Why did emoji become so popular?

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Consider the tilde. There it is, that little squiggle, hanging out on the far-upper-left-hand side of your computer keyboard. The symbol dates back to ancient Greece, though tilde comes from Spanish, and in modern English it’s used to indicate “approximately” (e.g., ~30 years) or “equivalence” (x ~ y) in mathematics. And, as of this year, according to a breakdown of the Web site emojitracker by Luminoso, a text-analytics company, the tilde was surpassed in usage on Twitter by the emoji symbol for “joy.” Which looks like this: .

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The Joy emoji—also referred to on the Emojipedia Web site as “Face with Tears of Joy” or “the LOL Emoji” (emoji don’t have official names, just nicknames created by their users)—dates back, in North America, to roughly 2011, when Apple put a readily accessible emoji keyboard in iOS 5 for the iPhone. Which means that in three short years, Face with Tears of Joy vanquished the 3,000-year-old tilde.

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And that’s just one emoji. If we count all emoji together—Smiling Face and Smiling Face with Smiling Eyes and Grinning Face and Winking Face and Smiling Face with Heart-Shaped Eyes and Kissing Face and Kissing Face with Closed Eyes and Face with Stuck-Out Tongue with Tightly Closed Eyes , not to mention House with Garden and Convenience Store and Tram and Love Hotel and Ghost and Money with Wings and Chart with Upward Trend and Hamburger —then emoji, as a group, are now used more frequently on Twitter than are hyphens or the numeral 5.

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All of which is to say: The 3,000-year-old tilde might want to consider rebranding itself as Invisible Man with Twirled Mustache.

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It’s easy to dismiss emoji. They are, at first glance, ridiculous. They are a small invasive cartoon army of faces and vehicles and flags and food and symbols trying to topple the millennia-long reign of words. Emoji are intended to illustrate, or in some cases replace altogether, the words we send each other digitally, whether in a text message, e-mail, or tweet. Taken together, emoji look like the electronic equivalent of those puffy stickers tweens used to ornament their Trapper Keepers.°

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And yet, if you have a smartphone, emoji are now available to you as an optional written language, just like any global language, such as Arabic and Catalan and Cherokee and Tamil and Tibetan and English. You’ll find an emoji keyboard on your iPhone, nestled right between Dutch and Estonian. . . .

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In 2013, in response to the question “Do you use stickers or emoji in message apps?” 74 percent of people in the United States and 82 percent in China responded that they have. (Stickers are a kind of faux emoji—things like Seinfeld emoji or the Peanuts characters you find on Facebook—that you can send using certain apps but that aren’t baked into Unicode.°) Over 470 million Joy emoji are being sent back and forth on Twitter right now—which makes the Joy emoji the number 1 most popular emoji on Twitter (it tends to compete for the top spot with the Heart). Lovers have successfully wooed one another with emoji. Recruiters for ISIS are using emoji in their friendly sounding, ISIS-promoting tweets. Someone put together a song-length emoji-translation video of Beyoncé’s “Drunk in Love,” while someone else translated R. Kelly’s “Trapped in the Closet” into emoji, while someone else translated all of Moby-Dick (titled, inevitably, Emoji Dick). There are no fewer than three emoji-only social networks currently in development: Emojicate, Emoji.li, and something called Steven. The Web site Emojinalysis will track your recent emoji use to analyze your emotional well-being. The rapper Drake recently got an honest-to-God tattoo of an emoji that, depending on whom you ask, means either “praying hands” or “high five” . (Drake says praying hands. “I pity the fool who high-fives in 2014,” he clarified via Instagram.)

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This elasticity of meaning is a large part of the appeal and, perhaps, the genius of emoji. They have proved to be well suited to the kind of emotional heavy lifting for which written language is often clumsy or awkward or problematic, especially when it’s relayed on tiny screens, tapped out in real time, using our thumbs. These seemingly infantile cartoons are instantly recognizable, which makes them understandable even across linguistic barriers. Yet the implications of emoji—their secret meanings—are constantly in flux.

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Decoding pictures as part of communication has been at the root of written language since there was such a thing as written language. “What is virtually certain,” writes Andrew Robinson in Writing and Script: A Very Short Introduction, is “that the first written symbols began life as pictures.” Pictograms—i.e., pictures of actual things, like a drawing of the sun—were the very first elements of written communication, found in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and China. From pictograms, which are literal representations, we moved to logograms, which are symbols that stand in for a word ($, for example) and ideograms, which are pictures or symbols that represent an idea or abstract concept. Modern examples of ideograms include the person-in-a-wheelchair symbol that universally communicates accessibility and the red-hand symbol at a pedestrian crossing that signals not “red hand” but “stop.”

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Emoji can somewhat magically function as pictograms and ideograms at the same time. The most straightforward example is the Eggplant emoji. On one level, it looks like an eggplant and can be used to communicate “eggplant.” On another level, it looks (kind of) like a penis and can be used to communicate all manner of lascivious intent, especially when combined with a peach. As Jenna Wortham, a New York Times technology reporter, wrote in an essay about emoji for Womanzine’s emoji issue, they “have become an ever-evolving cryptographic° language that changes depending on who we are talking to, and when.” In short, emoji are a secret code language made up of symbols that everyone already intuitively understands.

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“When it comes to text-based communication, we’re babies,” explains Tyler Schnoebelen, a linguistics Ph.D. from Stanford who works for Idibon, a text-analytics company. As he says, we’ve learned to talk, and we’ve learned to write, but we’re only now learning to write at the speed of talking (i.e., text), sending messages over vast expanses, absent any physical contextual clues. If you are talking to someone face-to-face, you don’t need an additional word or symbol to express “I’m smiling” because you would, presumably, be smiling. The psychologist Albert Mehrabian, in an oft-cited (and occasionally criticized) study, determined in the 1950s that only 7 percent of communication is verbal (what we say), while 38 percent is vocal (how we say it) and 55 percent is nonverbal (what we do and how we look while we’re saying it). This is well and good for face-to-face communication, but when we’re texting, 93 percent of our communicative tools are negated.

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Enter emoji.

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Emoji were born in a true eureka moment,° from the mind of a single man: Shigetaka Kurita, an employee at the Japanese telecom company NTT Docomo. Back in the late 1990s, the company was looking for a way to distinguish its pager service from its competitors in a very tight market. Kurita hit on the idea of adding simplistic cartoon images to its messaging functions as a way to appeal to teens. The first round of what came to be called emoji—a Japanese neologism that means, more or less, “picture word”—were designed by Kurita, using a pencil and paper, as drawings on a 12-by-12-pixel grid and were inspired by pictorial Japanese sources, like manga (Japanese comic books) and kanji (Japanese characters borrowed from written Chinese).

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Kurita wound up with 176 crude symbols ranging from smiley faces to music notes. This feature proved so popular that the other Japanese telecoms adopted it. In 2007, Apple released the first iPhone—and the global smartphone market boomed. Apple and Google both realized that, in order to crack the Japanese market, they would need to provide emoji functions in their operating systems,° if only for use in Japan. So Apple buried an emoji keyboard in the iPhone where North Americans weren’t intended to find it. But eventually tech-savvy users in the United States, who were curious about the Japanese emoji phenomenon, figured out that you could force your phone to open this hidden keyboard by downloading a Japanese-language app, and voilà—suddenly you could bejangle your texts with a smiling Pile of Poo . . . .

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The programmers behind each operating system are free to design their emoji as they like. However, the emoji palette—the collection of 722 standardized emoji that are available for you to use—has been encoded by the Unicode Consortium, which was founded in 1990 and consists of a loose network of contributing members. The people who do work for Unicode tend to be computer-programming experts with a side interest in linguistics—a typical biography: “His hobbies include Maltese-language advocacy.” They are, in a way, the modern analog to the devout monks who sat and diligently created illuminated manuscripts so that great written works of theology could be widely shared.

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Emoji presented a new and unique dilemma to Unicode. “With most text, you don’t have things being invented left, right, and center,” says Peter Constable, the vice president of Unicode. “The letters of English are the letters of English. We don’t have people inventing new letters of English every day.” With emoji, however, there are limitless possibilities for new symbols, and it’s literally impossible to meet the demand. And so, despite the fact that, as of 2011, you could text a cartoon pile of poo to any person in the world, people in the world were not happy. The world wanted an emoji hot dog! And an emoji avocado! And, understandably, representations of people of color! But in order to add new emoji, Unicode would have to invent them, then design them, then approve them, and then encode them. And Unicode is not in the business of inventing or designing new emoji, any more than it would invent and design new English letters and add them to the alphabet.

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Unicode did decide, however, to encode the 250 new emoji to be released this summer, which should show up on your phone as soon as Apple, Google, Microsoft, and other Unicode signatories add them to their operating systems. (Apple’s iOS 8, for example, does not have the latest emoji, and the company has declined to comment on when they might go live.) None of these “new” emoji are actually new—instead, the new emoji are all either translations of preexisting font sets known as Wingdings and Webdings, or they are fairly boring new symbols, like the ever-useful Increase Font Size Symbol.

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There are, though, a few notable additions, such as th[e] Man in Business Suit Levitating (also referred to as Jumping emoji or Hovering emoji) , which is an excellent example of how the technologically convoluted path for new emoji leads to the existence of totally weird and random characters. . . .

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Now, at least as far as your Unicode-reading smartphone is concerned, Man in Business Suit Levitating is as legitimate a character as the numeral 5, or the letter A, or the tilde, or poo. What that man will mean—well, that’s entirely up to you. This is the fun of emoji. The nail-painting emoji , in some circles, has come to mean “I’m not bothered” or “Haters gonna hate.” Man in Business Suit Levitating could mean “jumping for joy,” or it could mean “mystery.” (Online speculators have already nicknamed it “the Man in Black emoji.”) As Wortham explains about her favorite emoji, the Tempura Shrimp , what she loves about it is precisely the fact that it can have many different meanings. Sometimes she uses it to mean a foul or “salty” mood, when she wants to curl up like a shrimp. With some of her friends, the shrimp morphed into a joke that stands in for “Mariah Carey.” (“Something about her complexion and the way she’s always stuffed into a tube-ish dress,” Wortham writes in her shrimp essay.) Others use the shrimp as “quirky filler”—a nod, a wink, an acknowledgment that you’re simply thinking of someone. Tempura Shrimp emoji, she writes, has become “a way to be present when there’s nothing else to say at all.”

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Consider the exclamation point. For much of its history, the exclamation point had a fairly simple usage: to straightforwardly and sincerely indicate excitement or, if included in a quotation, vehemence° or volume. (“Get off my lawn!” as opposed to “Get off my lawn.”) Yet for a long time, circa the mid-1990s, it seemed linguistically and socially impossible to use an exclamation point unironically. I’ll anchor this observation to Peter Bagge’s landmark grunge-culture° comic Hate!, which debuted in 1990, simply titled Hate, but which added the telltale exclamation point to its name at issue No. 16 in 1994. I’ll also add, from personal recollection, that if you included an exclamatory phrase such as “I’m so excited!” or “See you tonight!” in any written electronic correspondence up to, say, 1999, you could reliably assume it would be read as the punctuational equivalent of a smirk.

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That was how my generation came to use the exclamation point, anyway. More recently, with the advent of new forms such as tweets and text messaging, the exclamation point has reverted to something closer to its original meaning. In fact, it’s more or less switched places with the period, so that “I’m excited to see you!” now conveys sincere excitement to see you, while “I’m excited to see you.” seems, on a screen at least, to imply the opposite. The exclamation point, once so sprightly and forceful, has come, according to Ben Yagoda in a piece in the New York Times, to signify “minimally acceptable enthusiasm.” . . .

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When I first encountered emoji, I assumed they were used only ironically—perhaps because, as a member of Generation X,° I am accustomed to irony as a default communicative mode. And it’s certainly true that emoji have proved popular, unsurprisingly, with early adopters and techno-fetishists and people with trend-sensitive antennae—the kinds of people who might, for example, download a Japanese app to “force” their iPhone to reveal a hidden emoji keyboard. But emoji have also proved to be popular with the least techno-literate and ironic among us, i.e., our parents. Many people I spoke to relayed that their moms were the most enthusiastic adopters of emoji they knew. One woman said that her near-daily text-message-based interaction with her mother consists almost entirely of strings of emoji hearts. Another woman, with a septuagenarian° mother, revealed to me that her mom had recently sent a text relaying regret, followed by a crying-face emoji—and that this was possibly the most straightforwardly emotional sentiment her mother had ever expressed to her.

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And now we’re getting to the heart of what emoji do well—what perhaps they do better even than language itself, at least in the rough-and-tumble world online. Aside from the widespread difficulty of expressing yourself in real time with your clumsy thumbs, while hunched over a lit screen, and probably distracted by 50 other things, there’s the fact that the Internet is mean. The widespread anonymity of the Web has marked its nascent years with a kind of insidious incivility that we all now accept with resignation. Comment sections are a write-off. “Troll” is a new and unwelcome subspecies of person. Twitter’s a hashtag-strewn battlefield.

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But emoji are not, it turns out, well designed to convey meanness. They are cartoons, first of all. And the emoji that exist—while very useful for conveying excitement, happiness, bemusement, befuddlement, and even love—are not very good at conveying anger, derision, or hate. If we can take as a given that Millennials, as a generation, were raised in a digital environment—navigating, for the first time, digital relationships as an equally legitimate and in some ways dominant form of interpersonal interaction—it stands to reason they might be drawn to a communicative tool that serves as an antidote to ambient incivility. They might be especially receptive to, and even excited about, a tool that counteracts the harshness of life in the online world. They might be taken with emoji.

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The word that came up multiple times, in many conversations, with many people about emoji was soften.

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“The thing it does is soften things,” says Tyler Schnoebelen, the linguistics expert.

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“I use emoji in personal e-mails all the time, because I feel like I’m softening the e-mail,” says Vulture’s Lindsey Weber, who cocurated the Emoji art show.

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Alice Robb, who is in her twenties, wrote in the New Republic about saying goodbye to a friend who was moving across the country via text message. “I texted her an emoji of a crying face. She replied with an image of a chick with its arms outstretched. This exchange might have been heartfelt. It could have been ironic. I’m still not really sure. It’s possible that this friend and I are particularly emotionally stunted, but I put at least part of the blame on emoji: They allowed us to communicate without saying anything, saving us from spelling out any actual sentiments.” And yet what’s striking is that her whole story is full of actual sentiment—she is no doubt sad that her friend is leaving, and her friend is no doubt sad to be leaving. Adding an emoji to a message doesn’t undercut those sentiments (as irony would) but rather says, “I mean this, but it’s hard to say it, and I know it’s hard, but that makes it no less true.” Emoji’s default implication isn’t irony; its default is sincerity, but sincerity that’s self-aware. If the ironic exclamation point was the signature punctuational flourish of Generation X, the emoji—that attempt to bridge the difficult gap between what we feel and what we intend and what we say and what we text—is the signature punctuational flourish of the Millennials.

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Questions to Start You Thinking

Journal Prompts

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Suggestions for Writing