The Emoji Movie is an animated movie that Sony released in 2017. In case you haven’t seen it, the movie is set in a dystopian emoji world seen inside the messaging app. The phone operator Erin receives a text from his crush at the start of the film. His task is to remain calm and reply with the appropriate emoji which he does by selecting the “meh” emoji. However, things don’t turn out how he planned, courtesy of that emoji, (Gene) going through what can best be described as a mid-life crisis. From there, the audience is transported to this dystopia via the app’s programming where the rest of the movie unravels.
Emojis were created as typographical siblings to emoticons. Developed in the late 1990s as technology advanced, they were made by a Japanese telecom company, NTT DoCoMo. Its name, which loosely translates as “pictograph,” is a contraction of the terms “e” and “moji”.
Eternity Marketing explains that despite having no relevance in the academic world, “emojis are essential to communicate emotion, something that words cannot portray. Emojis are meant to be fun, light-hearted, and convey a broad range of emotions efficiently and in a way that words sometimes cannot.”
Emojis were used and are still used to express emotion in ways that words alone cannot, before memes, GIFs, or stickers. Considering the exponential rise of the digital age, its relevance to socialisation and significance in the simplification of fundamental social cues cannot be understated. And with this year’s World Emoji Day coming up on the 17th of July, there’s a possibility its current number of nearly 3,500 will grow.
Emojis are fantastic for improving our contact with others, especially with loved ones. They express our best and worst emotions when we are unable to do so physically. It goes without mentioning that they have a lot of potentials as they are full of meaning.
It is giving the phrase, “a picture is worth a thousand words” a new meaning with a generation that says less. This is also evident in the way phone numbers are saved. Those of close friends or partners are likely stored with a love emoji serving as a suffix. A booty call will likely be stored with a peach or eggplant and so forth.
While demystifying the denotative meanings of each emoji would be entertaining, it’s not the goal. Rather, it is to explore how emojis are used in relationship dynamics, how they are perceived in contemporary society, and whether you should be concerned if your name doesn’t contain an emoji.
Love is an immensely powerful emotion that when in a relationship, committed or not, wouldn’t be out of place if you save your partner’s contact with an emoji. Yes, some of us are guilty of it, myself included.
You’ve just gotten the number of the self-acclaimed love of your life and instinctively, the next thing to do is to bombard it with emojis that represent that affection, allure or adulation.
Or it is the number of someone you met at the gym, and you save it as “gym guy” with the weights emoji. Fret not, there’s no saying you’re different from the next guy who isn’t particular about emojis. You are not one of those people who say they only read books with pictures in them, you just derive satisfaction from seeing them. Aesthetically, it releases into the body, some little amount of dopamine when you see it.
Emojis could be connected to human emotions if we stick to our understanding of what they are and how they express the mental state of a person. Therefore, as you scroll carefully for an emoji and place your digits on each letter to form the name, the emoji stands in for the relationship.
When someone deletes an emoji from your name, for some people it indicates that everything that was shared before that point is now invalid. A breakup of some sort. While it might not mean a lot if you save a contact with an emoji, getting stripped of one and left in a phone book of emojis, it passes a message.
It is subjective how it is perceived in today’s society. Emojis are a major concern for me personally; I pay attention to what emojis you use and how my name is saved. And when I find my name listed beside the location of our first encounter, I jump to dispute. But I also realize that, aside from romantic love, the original point of contact can occasionally have an impact on how contacts are saved. Will it nevertheless prevent me from disputing? No.
Nobody enjoys being saved by a location, I believe I can speak for a large number of individuals when I say that. There’s just something impalpable about it. . Whether there is an emoji or not actually shouldn’t cause too much trouble, but if you discover that there was one and it’s gone, it’s time to get your home in order. When it has already occurred, it no longer poses a concern. It is merely a response to underlying issues. While it is an indicator it is nothing to caress and pile on. Ignore it and press for the reasons why you’ve been demoted.
