The Dangers of Engaging Emojis

How 😊🤬👍🙃😍 Destroy Dialogue and Serve Tech Firms (Vol. 5; Issue 30)

George Orwell’s (1949/1981) idea of newspeak finds its match in the ubiquity of emoji usage. The analogy for authoritarian government in the novel, Big Brother, promoted newspeak to control the population. Albeit more symbolic than actual, emojis serve the same function. They disrupt our already-fragile capacity for dialogue, and they ensure attachment to Big Tech—a modern day equivalent of Big Brother.

Engaging in meaningful dialogue with others is a delicate endeavor. As social animals, we have a psychophysiological need to connect to others. However, we also share a universal fear of self-exposure. We need to be seen and yet we fear being seen. Emojis, absurdly intended to represent emotions, disrupt this fragile interpersonal process. Here are but a few examples:

You feel anxious about asking a new friend for lunch, wondering if he wants to take another step towards closeness. You text him:

Hey Joe, are you free for lunch this Friday?

He replies with 👍.

Or, you send a text to a friend gossiping about a colleague’s haircut, writing:

What’s up with Sally? Did she regress to the 1950s or style her hair like a Texan?

And you get back only a 😂.

Finally, after carefully composing a romantic missive to your partner, such as:

I cannot believe my luck at finding and being with you.

He replies with a ❤️.

These examples illustrate how a symbol, instantly available at our fingertips, replaces a meaningful response. Emojis, of course, are already layered upon the alienating effects of texting and emailing in the first place. They have already sterilized our animal status. They invite us fearful-of-rejection humans to retreat, to hide out. Notice how the following responses, albeit constrained by the text phenomenon, feel better:

Hey Joe, so glad you reached out. I’ve enjoyed our talks and would love to have lunch with you.

Seriously! “The higher the hair the closer to God,” I guess.

I can’t tell you how much your text moved me. I feel the same way about you, beyond fortunate, I feel blessed!

Orwell’s work, influenced in no small part by the rise of authoritarianism in his time (like in ours), helps explain how emojis enable our techno-enslavement. In 1984, the fictional “Party” operating the totalitarian state of Oceania developed newspeak to restrict freedom of expression. By simplifying language, eliminating words, and altering the meanings of existing words to align with its ideology, the Party intended to narrow the range of thought. Newspeak, by restricting communication, reduced the possibility of dissent. It eliminated, to cite the novel directly, the risk of thoughtcrime. The newspeak word, doubleplusgood, described desirable actions by compliant, obedient citizens.

We live in a world more demanding of acquiescence than Orwell could ever have imagined—and that’s even before we consider America’s flirtation with authoritarianism (Snyder, 2018). We interact mostly by text and email. These ridiculous emojis to which we’ve become accustomed utterly fail to communicate emotions. We are, in truth, embodied human beings whose feelings can rarely be expressed by words, let alone by weird-looking symbols.

Orwell also could not have imagined that immense, international tech companies deliberately seek to discourage real interpersonal interactions. They reinforce connections to machines over persons. They not only track what makes us click, scroll, and swipe to recommend content, they also use our online social connections to keep us engaged. In short, tech companies intend to addict.

The resultant effects are evident everywhere. People rarely say “hello” to others in public because they amble along while listening to noise-cancelling headphones, talking on the phone, or scrolling Instagram. Lest you think use of the word, “addiction” hyperbolic, an addiction called Internet Gaming Disorder (IGD) earned recognition as a diagnosable mental disorder in 2013. Known as Gaming Disorder by ICD-11*, the condition is defined as gaming behavior involving impaired control of the activity, prioritizing it over all else, and being unable to stop the behavior despite its negative consequences.

We all know of, or even benefit from, algorithms that suggest products or services that we might like. It is easy to ignore the fact that these same algorithms create psychophysiological devotion to them. Our ever-increasing propensities to relate to machines over people lessens capacities for social interaction. It diminishes simple human kindness. In my view, and when added to the easy availability of weapons, it contributes to the rampant increase in violence. Addiction to machines erodes empathy. Many shooters cannot imagine that every person they maim or kill emotionally damages hundreds of others who loved them.

The use of shortcuts in communication is hardly a new phenomenon. In 1862, Victor Hugo famously sent a one-character telegram to his publisher to inquire about the sales of his novel, Les Misérables.

Hugo sent this in a telegram:

?

The publisher replied:

!

The exchange makes for a great story. It illustrates brevity in the use of language. Such communication gained fame well before the era wherein our creatureliness, our status as human animals descended from the great apes, came under unprecedented attack.

Who really cares about emojis, you may think. And, taken by itself, its a legitimate critique. But what about the millions around the world who spend hours scrolling Instagram and TikTok? What about the effects social media has on in-person communication. Studies suggest machine-addiction creates the high levels of anxiety, depression, and loneliness we’ve all heard about. Social media invites cyberbullying, social comparisons, and negative body images. Gen-Z, the first generation to grow up entirely in the digital age, is losing skills needed for nuanced face-to-face interactions. Many don’t learn about interpreting non-verbal cues; many don’t understand how to respond in real-time. Obviously, these impair the capacity to establish emotional or romantic intimacies.

Expanding upon the conclusion of several of my recent essays, we can resist these addictive demands to conform. We could check our phones only twice a day. We could avoid using social media. We can meet friends, imagine that, for coffee, lunch, or dinner. At the risk of backpedaling, emojis turn out to be the least of our problems. Now that artificial intelligence is part of daily conversation, and futurists like Ray Kurzweil (2024) anticipate brain-computer interfaces, a concerted effort is required to prevent machine addiction from permanently damaging our capacities for real, actual, fleshy, in-person social interaction.

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*ICD refers to the International Classification of Diseases, a manual created and continuously updated by the World Health Organization (WHO).

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References

Kurzweil, R. (2024). The Singularity is Nearer: When We Merge with AI. New York: Viking.

Orwell, G. (1949/1961). 1984. New York: Signet Classic.

Snyder, T. (2018). The Road to Unfreedom. New York: Crown.