Answer questions related to my presentation about Emoji

Weeks before I did a presentation on an interesting article The Conservatism of Emoji: Work, Affect, and Communication.  I link my article critique here in case you wanna have a review. The article insightfully discusses about the limitations and even side effects about emoji, on which I can see the point while also have my own doubts. The questions I have received now are mainly about the potentials of emoji or how to weigh its limits and strengths. Julliene's question specifically asks about the implication of emoji replacing words to account for large part of our daily communication. I'm grateful for all the questions asked, which inspire me to look deeper into the topic and I want to combine some of them to mainly talk about the positive and negative sides of applying emoji in our everyday communication.

Emoji, as defined by Stark and Crawford (2015), is a form of affective labor, which brings about the emotional expression and needs to the otherwise cold information technology. Its positive effects are obvious and experienced by most of us everyday--it brings emotion we ought to have in face-to-face conversation into text messages. A mere "Thank you" sounds aloof while "Thank you😚" looks way more intimate. With emoji, we find our text-based interpersonal communication can much better convey our genuine feelings and emotions to each other. Furthermore, emoji save us when the conversation is dead, embarrassing or when we don't know what to reply. It brings fun to our communication and offers chances to make people closer to each other. Not only a supplement of text-based communication to meet face-to-face communication, emoji can even go beyond the later. As I have exemplified in the critique, we may come across conditions we couldn't think of better words to describe or comment than an emoji face. For me, that face is 😂. It's so vivid and its meaning is so universal which sometimes can better represent my feelings than my own expressions. An important mechanism of emoji is to evoke empathy. Since patterns are less obscure and more explicit, it generate empathy among people in short time. While it's where the negative sides of emoji lie at the same time.

As we all know, people's emotions and feelings are among the most complex things in the world. Stark and Crawford (2015) exclaim that how come these patterns consisting of some bytes should be able to represent all human affection? Well, they actually not. Imaging talking with someone on the phone with whole screens of emoji, isn't that boring? Emoji are so universal that it could add cuteness to the talk but cannot make it unique as words may. In expressing one's complicated thoughts and feelings, words may work slowly and ask for more labor, but they are the correct tools. Positive and negative side of emoji, it's not that one side has already prevailed the other. Which side works depends on how we utilize it and how often we use it. In this case, if we are unwilling to put efforts  into express our complicated but precious thoughts, feelings and emotions through original words but depend too much on emoji, lots of sparks in life disappear and our interpersonal relationships tend to be fragile. No matter how powerful people brag about emoji, just imagine if Yeats could have his compositions made lasting contributions in emoji or if Darcy and Elizabeth could have resolved their differences in texting each other emoji.

The relation between emoji and us, is exactly like salt to us. A precise portion is perfect while overuse is disastrous. It's interesting that a lot of discussions about people and technology would reach the similar conclusion.