I’m a heavy emoji user, texting is such a poor medium for communication, many times people get the wrong message, but with an emoji you’ll get an idea of the face I’m making, so less chance of misunderstanding

I noticed that every time I add an emoji to a comment it gets downvoted, so I tested my theory, wrote a comment without an emoji, got upvotes, went back and added an emoji, got downvotes…

On Reddit people use emojis a lot, on Lemmy I NEVER saw anyone use emojis, my account is new but still for the time I spent here, I never saw the use of emojis

So, is it just me, have you noticed this small detail ? and do you miss emojis the way I do ? 😭

  • adderaline@beehaw.orgEnglish
    4·
    11 months ago

    ugh. you’ve pressed enough of my buttons to warrant a response.

    We’ve come a long way from cave drawings and hieroglyphics

    the idea that hieroglyphs are in some way inferior to modern writing systems in an objective way is flawed. hieroglyphs were a diverse writing system comprised of phonograms, logograms, and ideograms, and they could be used contextually to record a rich and complex language as fully featured as our own. the ancient Egyptians wrote their dreams, legends, and histories in this text for over 4000 years. the idea that our modern languages are somehow “better” than ancient languages is to misunderstand what language is.

    And yet there is a whole new wave of people unable to use those languages correctly or even rudimentarily who drag civilization backwards by returning to hieroglyphics

    the idea that there is a “”“correct”“” way to use language is flawed. the field of linguistics recognizes a vast diversity of languages, dialects, sociolects, and even idiolects that vary from each other in many interesting ways. collapsing that diversity into a single “correct” way to use language is nonsense, and has historically served to exclude those whose dialect is not supported by powerful institutions. just because people aren’t speaking like you are doesn’t mean they’re speaking wrong, or “rudimentarily”.

    instead of catastrophizing about how new ways of communicating might end the world, as people have done literally since we started to write down things, linguists have studied how and why emojis exist, and, unsurprisingly, its not because people are getting stupider or something like that. its because they’re useful for conveying non-linguistic social information in informal written communication. without the non-verbal queues, vocal tone, and other contextual information that exists in spoken language, emojis are one of many ways to add context that can’t be represented through text alone. tone indicators and emoticons serve similar roles.

    And things like emojis are leading the charge.

    this is cringe. small changes in the structure of our informal written communication are never going to be the big, important thing you seem to think they are. if you’re this passionate about language that you think it can be ruined by funny little pictures, learn some linguistics. nobody who knows anything substantive about language shares your concerns, because they’re too busy studying the interesting new cultural phenomenon and what it might mean for our understanding of human communication.