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FEW YEARS ago,
I staged an emoticon
intervention with
my father.
I’d realized with horror that he
had been sprinkling smiley faces
into the messages he sent to his
friends, relatives and even business
acquaintances, so I sat him down
for a stern conversation about the
crippling un-coolness that the
habit conveyed. No one, I told him,
should be caught dead using
.
At the time, I congratulated myself on being a caring daughter
who’d saved her father from looking
like a fool. Yet recently, I’ve realized
my dad was just an early adopter.
Emoticons and their more intricate Japanese cousins, emoji, have
been enjoying a renaissance, while
stickers — cartoon-like digital
illustrations — are carving out a
niche of their own.
The growing popularity of all
this cutesy communication is usually attributed to the difficulty
people have conveying emotion
and nuance via quickly-typed
text. But emoji and their ilk are
more than elaborate punctuation
marks, and in fact part of their
appeal is precisely their indefinite meaning. They’re a way to
say something to someone when
A
CULTURE
HUFFINGTON
06.23.13
you don’t have anything to say, a
digital alter ego that establishes
a virtual presence with another
person, without any specific purpose besides “hi.” Using emoji, in
a sense, is like hanging out online.
In the past year, frowny faces,
clinking beer mugs, adorable chicken legs and other illustrations have
become virtually omnipresent online. My Instagram feed frequently
has more emoji than photographs:
Snapshots are captioned with a
sprinkling of emoji, which range
from the mundane (heart, kissy
lips, crying face) to the poetic (bowl
of ramen, power plant, dancing girls
in black leotards and cat ears).
Facebook recently launched its
own breed of emoticons, a stable
of yellow faces depicting feelings
of disappointment, annoyance and
the feeling “meh” that are based
on research done by Darwin. Startups are even touting stickers as a
business model: The social networking app Path launched a store
that peddles its own, branded
stickers, while Lango, a messaging app that sells images users can
add to their texts, said hundreds of
people had purchased its $99.99
all-inclusive sticker packs within
a few weeks of the app’s launch.
An app created by Snoop Lion, aka