At 30, I am still considered a millennial. Yet unlike many in my age group, for years I was stubborn about one very popular, unimportant activity: I disliked using emoji in my text messages.
For years, I’ve watched the inexorable rise of emoji, a collection of happy faces, kissing lips, cigarettes and piles of feces that come in the form of a pictographic keyboard on our iPhones and Android devices. Hundreds are tweeted every minute. They are used as appendices on Venmo, the peer-to-peer payments app, to describe transactions.
My problem is that I have always been partial to words and letters. I majored in English literature and prided myself on my bookshelf and looked up to modern masters of language. I could not push myself to text my girlfriend an image of a smiley face in sunglasses to let her know I was having a good afternoon.
Yet emoji, however inelegant as they may seem, have become a language of their own, a way to transcend the limits of one’s native tongue to communicate with others worldwide.
This surge is perhaps best illustrated across Instagram, the immensely popular photo-sharing app that Facebook owns. Nearly 40 percent of all text posted to Instagram contains at least one emoji in the photo caption, according to the company. In some countries, like Finland, that number climbs to more than 63 percent. In much of Europe, emoji are present in more than half of all Instagram captions.
Instagram found that as emoji use rose across the app, the use of Internet slang formed from English letters went down, and that the two phenomena were strongly correlated. That could explain why you may be seeing fewer instances of “Lol” on Instagram photo captions, while smiley face emoji are becoming more prevalent.
“It is a rare privilege to observe the rise of a new language,” Thomas Dimson, a software engineer on Instagram’s data team, said in a company blog post on Friday. “Emoji are becoming a valid and near-universal method of expression in all languages.”
Even as the limits of emoji characters are reached by the number of available emoji — around 700 by most standard shared measures — users are finding new ways to use them to communicate. Pairing two or more emoji together, for instance, can form rudimentary sentences or sentiments for others to understand. On Instagram, shoes and handbag emoji can often appear together, just as water and marine animals may often pop up alongside the bathing suit emoji.
Instagram itself is a means of expression that does not require the use of words. The app’s meteoric rise has largely been attributed to the power of images, the ease that comes, for instance, in looking at a photo of a sunset rather than reading a description of one.
Other companies, like Snapchat, have also risen to fame and popularity through the expressive power of images. Twitter, long seen as a place for text-based updates, has shifted to highlight photo and video in its stream in recent years. Facebook, the world’s most popular social network, is a near ceaseless stream of shared photos flowing through the News Feed.
Part of what had always bothered me about emoji was that it felt childish. And admittedly, parts of emoji use are still quite immature: Because of the eggplant emoji’s phallic shape, Instagram actively blocks searches for that particular image because “it consistently is used for content that violates their community guidelines,” according to BuzzFeed.
But that is a characteristic of language; there are crass uses, and there are more formal uses. This is just as true in millennia-old pictographic forms as it is in modern letters.
And a lot has changed in a short amount of time, especially since Apple and Google officially embraced emoji keyboards on their devices in 2011 and 2013. Emoji use has soared across many services, not just Instagram.
Now maybe I’ve swung too far the other way. My personal Twitter stream is a half-senseless stream-of-consciousness exercise in tech commentary and personal anecdotes, interspersed with whatever may be in front of my face at a given moment. (I am also not above crassness on Twitter.) I use emoji often when talking to friends, my girlfriend, even my parents.
But as more companies recognize how important emoji have become to hundreds of millions of people across the world, I’m just not as snobby as I used to be.