I have enough trouble interpreting the facial expressions of the real-time humans who I am conversing with, whose immediate emotional response to what I or they are saying is meaningful and important to me and which inform my own social behavior.
Now you want to shrink that whole set of social cues down to a handful of pixels, with loads of cultural and meta-cultural interpretation built in, and also give respondents as much time as they want to choose some tragically and perhaps intentionally vague icon to reply with that I’m then supposed to make sense of?
No. Already had that with words, thanks. Fuck emojis.
Red cheeks with wide eyes and an “o” mouth means one thing, while virtually the same thing but with a purple forehead instead of the red cheeks means something entirely different? Congratulations, you’ve reified my middle school experience into a goddamned tamagotchi and I hate it.
I’m not going to discuss the eggplant. Or the star or the bus or the shoe, or the juice box or the helicopter or the five (presumably) alcoholic drinks I’ve just scrolled through. Or how they only show up as suggestions while texting after you have already typed the word they symbolize and how that adds nothing to the conversation except a visual stumbling block, or how these things have NOTHING to do with emotions anymore. (Eggplant is the outlier here; even I know it’s never really used as an eggplant. And I’m angry that it can also be classified within the set of emojis that are encompassed by my first and final statement.)
Fuck emojis.