Don’t you hate it when that happens? You compose a targeted question, re-iterate the sentence a few times to make sure it is easy to interpret, press send, only to get a thumbs up in response? How should you even interpret that? Is that an ironic sure thing buddy go ahead I’ll revert your changes behind your back anyway; is that a honest go for it!; is that a whatever, no time right now but here’s something telling you I’ve read your thing; or is that a too long didn’t read? I don’t know, do you?
Clear and effective human communication is one of the hardest things to get right. The widespread adoption of emojis only made the problem worse. Instead of adding context, by, you know, using words, like these, emojis manage to strip even more context, sometimes paradoxically by addin…
Don’t you hate it when that happens? You compose a targeted question, re-iterate the sentence a few times to make sure it is easy to interpret, press send, only to get a thumbs up in response? How should you even interpret that? Is that an ironic sure thing buddy go ahead I’ll revert your changes behind your back anyway; is that a honest go for it!; is that a whatever, no time right now but here’s something telling you I’ve read your thing; or is that a too long didn’t read? I don’t know, do you?
Clear and effective human communication is one of the hardest things to get right. The widespread adoption of emojis only made the problem worse. Instead of adding context, by, you know, using words, like these, emojis manage to strip even more context, sometimes paradoxically by adding layers of confusion. Isn’t a thumbs up a universal sign of good!? It’s not, as I’ve seen it being used and abused in ways I would never ever dare to stick out my own thumb, like I would probably never Roll On the Floor Laughing when sending ROFL. Shut up boomer, that’s also being replaced by an emoji. I know, I just proved my point. And I’m not that old (yet).
You won’t find any usage of emojis in Brain Baking articles because I not only think they’re ugly or they form a danger to our ability to interpret longer texts, but also they induce ambiguity that always leaves me dazzled. Here’s some random proof why emojis just don’t work. Oh that’s what you meant!: reducing emoji misunderstanding by Tigwell and Flatla (2016—that’s almost ten years ago!):
[…] the purpose of the emoji was often misunderstood, e.g., “To me that looks like a nervous face but a lot of people use it as a really happy or excited face”
This gets worse in cross-cultural communication according to Cominsky. It’s not just a cross-cultural problem, it’s also a generational problem: a study by Zahra and Ahmed revealed that emojis such as thumbs up, crying laughing and skull are more likely to cause mix-ups between generations. Or how about surrounding the emoji with textual context in order to reduce potential confusion? That was disproven by Miller et al. in Understanding Emoji Ambiguity in Context: The Role of Text in Emoji-Related Miscommunication:
[…] we found that our results do not support the hypothesis in prior work: when emoji are interpreted in textual contexts, the potential for miscommunication appears to be roughly the same.
Guess what, Wang et al. found out that emotioanl emoji elicits are being abused by social media marketeers in order to increase customer engagement. Digging further specifically into thumbs-up emoji research, Bates writes about the recent court case recognising the thumbs-up emoji as having indicated contractual agreement, concluding that:
Perhaps it is best that communication with icons stays within three general settings: (1) A highly contextualized environment, in which a limited number of symbols are to be clearly understood, as with road and airport signage, warning labels, and computer interfaces; (2) Interpersonal communication—private exchanges often prioritizing the establishment and maintenance of good relations; (3) Internet postings meant for public consumption (e.g., social media comments).
A big thumbs up, Bates! See, that was easy, right? The last piece of research I’d like to share here is that of Shandilya et al. on using non-contextual communication in virtual workspaces like Slack and Google Chat. It looks like new employees first have to read between the lines and learn the intricate interpretation details of the micro-culture, sometimes even differing from team to team within the same company. Before we can send out a thumbs up, we first have to decode how others around us are using and interpreting it. Which might differ greatly from your habitually usage in causal app messages to friends.
Fellow blogger Horst Gutmann recently pointed to another study on the connection between emojis and personality traits: heavy reliance on emojis seems to shape our perceived image—and not in a very good way.
The biggest problem, however, is not using the thumbs-up emoji as part of a message: it is using the thumbs-up emoji as a reaction in itself—the recent phenomena called reaction emojis. A reaction is not a response. Our languages have words to form an expression, let’s make use of them. I sometimes receive conversation duds like that as an answer to three sentences of mine explaining how things are going. What am I supposed to do with that? If you’re not interested in knowing how I’m doing then don’t bother asking? My wife has one particular friend who simply replies all his messages with a thumbs up reaction. I would be inclined to stop exchanging messages at all with such a person.
I ROFL-ed (how am I supposed to conjugate this?) when I read MaliciousDog’s opinion on emoji reactions on Reddit:
They break the text consumption flow. In a coherent text, an emoji is somewhat like a fart in a middle of a nice song. It may be fun by itself or in an appropriate context but not everywhere.
Like a fart in a middle of a nice song.