While good writing and artwork undoubtably can express a far greater range of emotions than emoji—and with infinitely more subtlety—if you ask me how I’m feelin

While good writing and artwork undoubtably can express a far greater range of emotions than emoji—and with infinitely more subtlety—if you ask me how I’m feeling in casual conversation, 90% of the time I’ll reply “fine” or “ok” or “bad”. Being able to easily reply with one of 50 reaction emojis is a great improvement in expressiveness here. Emoji do become problematic when you start asking follow up questions, such as “what does feeling ‘bad’ feel like?” Since you’ve already expressed your specific state when you replied with your first emoji, to add more depth you start having to combine reaction emoji to express something new or repurpose other emoji as symbols. Which sounds a lot like any language actually A far more dangerous problem is that emoji can replace the idea of the things they are intended to represent. For example: the happiness emoji becomes our idea of what happiness is, instead of merely representing the concept of happiness. That seems to be what the article is driving at and it clearly would be bad if this widely happened. The result would be newspeak type language, incapable of expressing many ideas and that is controlled by these huge companies. Worse, using such a language, your subjective experience of life has to fit into the emoji standard because you lack the tools to express or even conceptualize anything beyond it.