Ardent speech about emojis
As soon as this post is published you’ll be allowed to call me a fearful reactionary but I have to make a confession. The thing is that I can’t stand emojis.
At first, there were just smiles. These funny yellow circles seemed really helpful to express emotions while texting and to prevent ambiguity. I started using them quite often and really enjoyed this new way to empathise certain nuances of my written speech.
Later on, when I first starting using an ‘innovation’, emojis, I also found them quite entertaining. Sometimes, my friends and I even made a kind of code with them. For example, we would make each other guess the hidden message.
Now I hate the emojis. What makes me so worried about people using them? The fact is that now emoji are either used in excess or compete with actual words. I’ve seen plenty of posts on the Instagram/FB/VK/etc. where each sentence ends up littered with small pictures. Why do this if the meaning of a text is obvious anyway? They neither look pretty nor are relevant. I’ve also seen posts without any words where all the author’s thoughts were put into pictures. It does kill writer’s creativity, doesn’t it? Instead of choosing weighted words, you can just flick through colourful rows of icons and find something close to what you were going to say. Instead of making up a syntactically complete sentence, you can just put together a load of badges.
I think about the books for children and the ones for adults. Where can one find more illustrations and less text and vice versa? It feels like we have become children again who can’t read huge meaningful texts – and what’s more – don’t want to. And it has to do with 'fragmented thinking’, which kills not only creativity but also the depth of comprehension, the ability to critically perceive information and the capacity to focus and concentrate.
I, of course, do not intend to quit using emoji and don’t judge anyone. I, myself, use them in spite of my own pathetic speech above. The only thing I try to do is to remind my readers that everything needs to be in balance.
https://memegenerator.net/instance/54550536/american-psycho-post-that-emoji-one-more-time
