Your brain on emoji

Making them part of the OS and character set so they could be used anywhere and not just on a web forum was what made them the emoji we know today, and what caused them to catch on.

But now services like Slack and Mastodon have what they call "custom emoji" which hijacks the term and takes us back to 1998 web forums again.

In particular, I have lamented the paucity of information that modern short form social media - 280 character Tweets; 10 second shorts; soundbytes, quips, and shitposts on Reddit - is able to carry. There simply is not enough information within the medium to sufficiently disambiguate the multiple senses and interpretations one can read into the message, and I believe it is this lack of being able to even agree on what is being said that leads to so much miscommunication and conflict today.

After all, any reading or interpretation of a message requires some form of _projection_ on the audience's part onto the canvas of the medium.

Frege once wrote, "Si duo idem faciunt, non est idem. If two persons picture the same thing, each still has his own idea." [0] Perhaps it is for this reason that Victorian-era writers (John Stuart Mill's "On Liberty" comes to mind) employed such a flowery and verbose brand of English; it is only by sketching out their ideas in high enough resolution that one can have some hope in hell of conveying an idea to their reader, intact and bearing at least some resemblance to whatever it is they had in mind.

To steal an idea from Wittgenstein's Tractatus, 4.026: "The meanings of the simple signs (the words) must be explained to us, if we are to understand them." If one does not take the time to expand upon the definitions or the subtleties of the words, signs, or emoji they use, it is no surprise that some misunderstanding may arise.

Why then, do we suppose that emoji will indeed communicate, unambiguously, the shades and nuances of meaning that we intend, simply because they bear some resemblance to a real-world object or common symbol? Did you contextualize its usage adequately? Is that picture indeed "worth a thousand words?" Which thousand did you choose when you last punched in that heart emoji?

Emoji have progressed to a fourth-order simulacrum, in Baudrillard's terminology: "it has no relation to any reality whatsoever." Where perhaps emoji once may have been able to refer to the depth of meaning, the underlying reality to which they point, I find they are now carelessly thrown around, often, as another commenter has mentioned below, towards manipulative ends. Even the simple heart emoji is not something I've even used with my father over iMessage until very recently. Love is after all, a very powerful concept, and yet here we are, throwing it around willy-nilly, left and right, to people we haven't even met in person - or worse, _next to the links to purchase reddit premium or reddit gold._ Far from being an actual message of _agape_ or even _philia,_ which may have been a function of a first-order simulacrum, where the map accurately reflected the territory, it has become a hollow icon, meant to evoke some sentiment or feeling in the reader by its presentation alone, and not by virtue of its connection to some actual underlying sense of love.

Baudrillard also writes: "All Western faith and good faith became engaged in this wager on representation: that a sign could refer to the depth of meaning, that a sign could be exchanged for meaning and that something could guarantee this exchange - God of course. But what if God himself can be simulated, that is to say can be reduced to the signs that constitute faith?"

I am not a Christian, or perhaps even a religious man, but the example is quite poignant. Can you draw me an emoji, an icon, of what was once taken to be the highest and most ineffable concept? And if emoji can fall short of communicating one ideal, why not others?

Yet here we are, exchanging hollow signs in a lifeless, meaningless formal system of cold syntax, bereft of semantics.

[0] http://www.scu.edu.tw/philos/98class/Peng/05.pdf