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As a millennial whose only chatting activities are confined to irc and doesn’t really get emojis — could someone please articulate this phenomenon in terms that

• hprotagonist 6y ago
  ironic effect is, of course, communication all by itself. My use of emoji in messaging applications is primarily limited to quick rebus-like reaction replies to meme images, a quick and dirty reaction to a message in slack expressing some vague emotional response, or making complicated fart-jokes with my partner that rely on a lot of out of band information. (i also use IRC on the daily, and have been known to use emoji there too, so these communication forms are not disjoint)
• eat_veggies 6y ago
  It can be a way of adding intonation and other affective, out-of-band communication back into text. I never really see people use them purely to replace words one-for-one. But interspersed throughout a message, emojis can, as you say, add irony, but also communicate that a message that could be taken as ironic isn't, or communicate some other subtext. Text is a flattening of speech, and emojis can add some of those missing dimensions back -- and, like our IRL verbal cues, tics, and gestures, they can be hard to decode if you're not "in" on the game.
  • zck 6y ago
    > I never really see people use them purely to replace words one-for-one. This article does that. Here it might be more often than the author would normally do, but I've seen things like that non-ironically. > To stay relevant in the age of social media you had to support emoji or you were in the . EDIT: HN stripped the emoji. The end of that sentence was "or you were :skull: in the :droplet:", read as "or you were dead in the water".
    • lovegoblin 6y ago
      > Here it might be more often than the author would normally do, but I've seen things like that non-ironically. Maybe not ironically, but doing that definitely adds informality - exactly the kind of out-of-band context that GP is talking about.
• 542458 6y ago
  IMHO it’s a few things: It’s an ingroup signal, indicating (by “correctly” using emoji) that you’re part of a specific subculture to the recipient. “Praying_emojii flame_emojii YASS” indicates to me that the writer is young and hip. “Do you want to have a BBQ bbq_emojii ?” says to me that the writer is older and less hip. It can be hard to communicate tone through writing. Emojis allow one to instantly mark a piece of writing as informal/non-serious with minimal effort. This includes irony - “eggplant_emojii” is often a non-serious reply indicating that “I am jokingly acting like this this is sexual or attractive” It’s a proxy for longer writing. “Thumbsup_emoji” is a substitute for some marginally harder to articulate feelings of “looks good / I like it” Of course, there are many subcultures that use emoji in different ways and as proxies for other things as well. At a previous employer we’d often just send “taco_emoji?” to ask who was buying lunch. It’s the sort of thing that can be used/abused in many different ways.
• lovegoblin 6y ago
  I really strongly recommend 'Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language' by Grechen McCulloch. It's a lighthearted linguistic look at how our written communication has changed over the last couple decades since the advent of mainstream internet access.
• ziml77 6y ago
  I've only seen this on Twitter and assumed it was to fit posts within the character limit.