Never has an emoticon dreamed of being able to become something as valuable and desired as an emoji: from MoMa's permanent collection to the word (?) of the year award, there are few things that these yellow dolls have not already achieved.
Never has an emoticon dreamed of being able to become something as valuable and desired as an emoji: from MoMA's permanent collection to the word (?) of the year award, there are few things that these yellow dolls have not already achieved.

Seemingly unimportant detail, but only so, considering all the data that supports the text that follows: my father doesn't use emojis. I went through eleven years of our conversations (WhatsApp and SMS) and never, not even once, he used a soccer ball, a kitten, a slice of pizza, a watch, whatever, to (send) me a message, a memo, a hint. Never. There must be thousands of characters in there, a mini Bible of family dialogues, just like so many others, but with nuance - the only person who likes emojis is me. In the middle of sentences, finishing an idea, apropos of nothing, it seems that my speech is alien, colorful, and a little crazy, in contrast with his, which is neat and polished, like the chalkboards in elementary school. Am I talking to myself in a dialect he doesn't know - did I mention that not once did he send a single smiley face? Yeah. Freud would explain all this, for sure. Being impossible to analyze these actions with his help, but let's launch into the possibilities: the relationship with emojis is a generational thing. Perhaps. Suddenly I am reminded of a few more people who are not crazy about emojis either, and who only risk their poor (and yet more refined, suggest many detractors) relative, the emoticon - for the most forgetful, the emoticon (a combination of the words "emotional" and "icon") is a simple pictogram that reveals expressions and feelings through punctuation marks, numbers, and other special symbols. No, my father doesn't like emoticons either. I don't understand how no TV station has yet interviewed him about a subject as pertinent as the revolution wrought by the yellow figures - and their colleagues - in our daily lives.
A yellow face crying with drool and snot. A yellow face laughing with laughter. A yellow face rolled its eyes. A yellow face covered in hearts. A yellow face looking surprised. A yellow face looks like he's telling someone to kiss his ass. A yellow face with hearts in the place of eyes. A yellow face that throws a heart out of its mouth, is often used for those who want to send one or more kisses, although others see it as a symbol of sudden facial paralysis. A yellow face melting. A yellow face wearing sunglasses. A pink heart. A peace sign. A green heart. A pair of eyes that seem to say "I see you." A croissant. A star. A sun. A girl with her hands on her face, a reflection of frustration and disappointment. A thumb extended, in a sign of agreement with something. A white heart. Two hands joined together, in the shape of a heart, which can also allude to a pretzel if our imagination is up to date. A red heart. In mid-June, I did an unscientific survey on a social network about the use of emojis. The aforementioned were the most popular, some of them multiple times, by users who took the time to access my curiosity - my dad doesn't have social media, so he didn't answer, nor did he have to, by now we all know what he was going to say, right? No, it wouldn't be "I don't use emojis," but rather "what is an emoji?" Almost none of those involved in the "study" knew/wanted to explain why they prefer one emoji over the other three thousand or so (data from 2021). Even I don't know. "Mine" is the bat. Because the gentlemen responsible for approving emojis have not yet given the go-ahead to the Red Bull emoji that I so desperately crave. No one has said "I don't like that, emojis," but it's possible that those who don't like emojis didn't even pay any attention to my appeal, which is fair enough. No debate was generated, neither about the existence of a Wikipedia of emojis nor about the subliminal meanings that this or that image might have. Case in point: a few years ago I was about to lose patience with a "friend" and, before that happened, I took a deep breath and asked Google for help. Before long I learned that shrimp is the perfect emoji to send when the intention is to leave the recipient in a nervous wreck. Who is expecting to receive a shrimp, just like that? No one. That is precisely the point. I kept my patience and he earned a night of insomnia (insert smiling devil).
How did we become so dependent on emojis? This is the question we put to Bernardo Coelho, sociologist, researcher, and university professor: "I don't know ifwe have become dependent on emojis. Maybe the term is not dependence. But I fully understand the phenomenon you are referring to. Maybe it happens for different reasons. Emojis make it possible to convey (or at least attempt to convey) emotions for which a relatively, or quite, sophisticated command of the language would be required. At least, for a good expression of emotions, with little room for doubt and ambivalence. Given that the territory of written messages has become popular, not everyone can be expected to have such language mastery skills. In this sense, emojis have become important communicative canes. But, at the same time, they can imply the loss of strength of the message. Because the person who writes is not necessarily committed to the words - there are no words, there are figures, and this disempowers the person who writes. The word implies a commitment on the part of the person who writes." This is a key point because emojis are the perfect outlet for the "but I didn't say anything like that," the "you got it all wrong," or the farfetched "it was all a miscommunication." They are just figures, they clothe themselves with an innocence that is not granted to words, which are heavy and definitive. Bernardo Coelho goes on to list possible reasons why we capitulate to emojis. "Second reason, perhaps related to unaccountability: it is a lazy gimmick. It becomes useful and insurmountable because it allows us to say what we want with less effort. Third reason. For playful reasons, that is, the use of emojis makes text conversations less boring. It's not just reading and writing, there is a playful dimension to communication, there are dolls that can make conversation lighter and more fun." It is not all rose-colored. Different emojis can have different meanings in different cultures, and different contexts within the same culture. Take the (controversial) eggplant-shaped emoji, which can refer either to the fruit itself or to a sexual organ.
None of this seems to be stopping the rise of emojis. In the last weeks of 2015, Time magazine published an article titled Oxford's 2015 Word of the Year Is This Emoji, whichit read: “Oxford Dictionaries made history on Monday by announcing that their “Word of the Year” would not be one of those old-fashioned, string-of-letters-type words at all. The flag their editors are planting, to sum up, who we were in 2015 is this pictograph, an acknowledgment of just how popular these pictures have become in our (digital) daily lives.” Next we could see the image of the "face with tears of joy" emoji and subsequently a justification for the honor bestowed upon the yellow figure. Although globally, emojis became famous in the early 2000s, the time of the first chat conversations, according to the statement released by Oxford University Press the emoji culture has exploded "in the last year" and, as a result, "emojis have come to embody a central aspect of life in a digital world that is visually oriented, emotionally expressive, and obsessively immediate." The decision was highly contested because, according to the most skeptical, an emoji may be many things, but it will never be a word. In their defense, at least we learned that 2015 was a happy year - unlike other more recent years where, we bet, any investigation would show that the characters sent in our text messages mirror a disoriented and aimless society.
And if all this sounds incredible, noteworthy, after all we are talking about little yellow figures whose size competes with that of an ant, the best was yet to come. In October 2016, the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA) announced the acquisition of the original set of 176 emojis for its permanent collection. Designed by Japanese artist Shigetaka Kurita, these ever-changing futuristic hieroglyphics were first released for pagers in 1999 at the request of Japan's largest phone company, NTT DoCoMo. They were the first catapults to be part of mobile communication, which then looked like something out of Back to the Future. It did. At the time, each of these 176 emojis was reproduced in one of only six colors - red, orange, lilac, green, blue, and black. In 2007, a Google software internationalization team applied for recognition of emojis by the Unicode Consortium, a non-profit organization that aims to ensure text standards across all computers. However, it wasn't until Apple integrated the first set of emojis into the iPhone in 2011 that the boom took place. This allowed people to access emojis directly from the keyboard of their smartphones. The initial symbols (car, sun, airplane, cloud) evolved into thousands of illustrated icons (beer mugs, mermaids, soap bubbles, tacos, light bulbs, pills) in multiple declinations that refer to feelings and moods (restless, curious, sad, happy). And they managed to do so in a revolutionary way, as they allowed to add an emotional subtext to an otherwise gray message: "Okay, fine by me" may sound passive-aggressive, but if the interlocutor adds something as simple as a heart (you are free to choose the color, of course, we still suggest white, which never compromises) the sentence takes on a new meaning. Are emojis a kind of new universal language? Probably. Paola Antonelli, a senior curator of architecture and design at MoMA, explained the relevance of the museum's new "piece" to The New York Times: "In a sense, what we've really acquired is a new communication platform. But at the same time, the emojis themselves are ideographs, one of the oldest ways of communicating. I love the way the centuries are connected in that way." From pager to the halls of MoMa: once upon a time there was a doddle with a very happy ending. There are still no emojis to explain this. If only my dad knew he had an art collection inside his phone...
Translated from the original on The Sunny Vibes Issue, from Vogue Portugal, published July 2022.Full stories and credits on the print issue.
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