Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language

Written language lacks the gestures and facial expressions of in-person conversation. Emoji—the little animated faces, hands, and objects that people often embed in their texts and chats—aren’t a separate language: It’s impossible, for example, to give a scientific lecture entirely with emoji. Emoji can, though, be analyzed as gestures.

Some emoji have become emblems with their own names—wink, thumbs up, jazz hands. Others have acquired emblematic status, their names transferring back into writing: The eggplant emoji, for example, widely used as a phallic symbol, has shifted the meaning of “eggplant” in written communications. Gifs sometimes serve as animated emoji, and some have been back-transformed into written expressions, as when excitement is represented by a gif of a wide-eyed Michael Jackson watching a movie while eating popcorn, which has been condensed to the phrase “*popcorn.gif*” (164).

Some gestures have no names, convey no meaning, and have no emoji. These forms of “co-speech” seem to be part of a speaker’s mental process; without them, people don’t do as well on math and certain visual puzzles. For other gestures, emoji need to be specific, and various emoji developers have converged on standardized shapes: The joyful dancing lady image can no longer be replaced when sent across platforms by a male disco dancer or a rose in a mouth. On the other hand, “illustrator emoji”—for example, cakes, gifts, sparkles, and confetti—can vary widely.

Emoji almost never tell stories; instead, like gestures, they transmit single ideas. Emojis can get repeated for emphasis: Several hearts in a row, or several thumbs up, mean strong affection or strong agreement, respectively. In general, emoji clarify the intent of a message—a smiley face can change an insult to a tease—in the manner of gestures.

With the advent of printing, setting letter type was repeatable and cheap, but illustrations were unique and expensive. Thus, books became mostly about written words. The first internet picture icons were made of punctuation, the most famous being the “smiley” or :-) that signified humor. These emotional icons, or “emoticons,” served the function later taken by emoji.

In 1997, Japanese phone companies figured out how to send a numeric code that devices could recognize as an emoji already installed in memory; this made the tiny icons cheap to send. Emoji combine the richer animation of a gif with the single-line ease of use of emoticons. They were introduced to smartphones in 2011 and have become wildly popular worldwide. The Unicode Consortium rolls out about 100 new ones each year.

In making gestural communication more accessible to writers, emoji add to our arsenal of techniques for getting across ideas, feelings, and multiple levels of meaning. 

Learning how to walk took time but rewarded practice, and once a person knows how, they’ve got it for life. Conversation also takes time to master, but its norms are in flux, especially on the internet, and we must constantly update our knowledge of its rules.

Phatic expressions are sets of fairly meaningless words that begin or end communications—“What’s up?”—acknowledge a transaction—“Thanks” and “You’re welcome”—and otherwise smooth out interactions. We’re generally unaware of these connectors until something changes them.

The first big technical alteration in live conversation came from the telephone, which complicated ordinary greetings. The person who answered didn’t yet know who was calling, so a new convention was established, the word “hello,” which also caught on everywhere else, its meaning shifting from a summons to a general-purpose greeting.

Over time, though, “hello” has gotten replaced in many social situations with “hi” and “hey.” Emails once began with “Dear,” but that vestigial phatic usage, along with “Sincerely” at the end, is fading away, much as “Your Obedient Servant” and related colorful greetings and farewells of past centuries disappeared from letter writing (206).

Conversation is about taking turns, and it’s a rapid-fire process: Pauses of as little as 0.2 seconds after a question can cause someone to repeat it. Timing is important, and we listen for signals that the other person is done so we can reply seamlessly. People signal they’ve finished talking by a pitch change, looking back at the listener, or other subtle cues; it’s easy to get these signals wrong and interrupt.

At first, online chat systems overlapped everyone’s typing; soon, separate chat boxes were assigned to each user. This, too, proved awkward and was replaced by streaming systems that let people compose first and then send, generating a rapid-fire back-and-forth that moves down a page and that people can handle easily. This has been the standard format of chat since the early 1980s.

On today’s devices, a chat or texting stream is presented as one continuous conversation. Chat and text are so convenient—you can see who’s contacting you, and you can respond quickly and quietly when you have a moment—that they’ve replaced phone calls for most purposes.

The appeal of Facebook, Twitter, and other forums for chat is that they create a “third place,” beyond home and work, where people can get together. Third places include coffee shops, bars, malls, school hallways, and bingo parlors; they’re where people catch up and share news. The internet also is a third place: Online, people can join a book club or chess group or cooking class or TV-show fan club and develop new friendships while obtaining information on favorite topics.

They also can simply join Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other general-purpose online spaces where their friends already congregate. Young people especially tend to do this, and “social media is taking on the functions of a hangout place for teenagers” (227).

A lot of internet conversation is deliberately obscure: It’s for certain members only, hints at a problem with an unnamed person, or hides political dissent from repressive governments. Nicknames for small kids permit parents to discuss them without damaging the kids’ later online reputations; song lyrics suggest feelings about others without addressing them directly. Threads tend to follow their original tone: Hateful speech begets hateful harangues, and polite posts generate considerate comments.