Key to my point was "widely". I should have also clarified that it's the author's emotional state, and that it's the emotional state as it pertains to the text.

Key to my point was "widely". I should have also clarified that it's the author's emotional state, and that it's the emotional state as it pertains to the text. Many people send emoji with nearly every cluster of related sentences. Both the frequency we communicate our emotions and the granularity of doing so have skyrocketed in the past five years alone. Edit: You may appreciate the written word as-is, but consider that emoji have dramatically increased the expressiveness of written text. Historically, written text has often been misinterpreted due to lack of contextual information. Was the person joking? Were they serious but it's not really a big deal? Was something said in anger, sorrow, or joy? Emoji are still a crude tool, but they're a marked improvement over the previous situation where people left these context clues out of their messages entirely.