Micah

Emoji’s And Emotions According to Merriam-Webster “the emojis are any of various small images, symbols or icons in text fields in electronic communication to express the emotional attitude of the writer, convey messages succinctly...” Basically an emoji adds an emotional emphasis to a message. Emoji’s are akin to the tone of voices, pitch, in a telephone conversation. Emoji’s are gestures in print. There is an emoji to say how much you love, there is an emoji for how angry you are and there is an emoji for not being able to even explain yourself. The amount of times you send these give the reader context on just what the degree of that which you’re trying to convey is. Photo by Bernard Hermant on Unsplash Sadly, we are missing basic elements of empathy with the use or misuse or misunderstanding of the emoji. People are said to not properly convey feelings with words alone. So what does it mean when someone says something and feels strongly about it, without adding an emoji. This leads to the question - “Why do we perceive people who use emoji’s in chats as being friendlier?” Does the use or absence of it trigger a degree of safety?” In telephone conversations, we can tell how nervous someone is or how angry just by the pitch of their voices. For face to face conversations, gesticulations and facial expressions can convey a lot and not hide much. Chats however leaves little to imagine. Especially in instances where the emoji’s are misused. Emoji’s are un-official, they can not be used in official company-client relations emails. You use them to ease the tension. But still a lot of people are still un-certain and guarded. You meet someone new and you aren’t sure what all the smiley emojis are for, your jokes are not so funny anyway so why are they so gassed up?! Photo by Fausto García on Unsplash With the world today being so self aware and enlightened on the signs of and symptoms of self harm it is very important to look beyond the use of emoji’s as an okay for good feeling or vibes. Not everyone is well versed in the articulateness of the emoji language and this does not mean they do not mean well. And one who has a phd in it, those who begin and end every sentence with and emoji, yeah, they do not always mean all of the “EmojiSmileyFaces”. Sometimes, it just might be their insecurities playing out, the moment you feel the need to include emojis to subtly pass across your message you tend to loose the entire purpose of a conversation in the first place, also depends on the person you are trying to hard not to offend; is it worth the stressful fun?! Be careful to not be caught up in the assumption of redifining communication. Whatever works for you is fine but be emoji sympathetic to those who can’t. We would all be EmojiFine!! Dab,littledayout