What's in an Emoji?

In the span of a single day, I either received or sent a thumbs up at least a dozen times. Which got me wondering: is the burgeoning visual language and culture of emojis, emoticons and icons indicative of a deficit or abundance of intent for clarity in modern communication?

Perhaps ironically, it was an article on the site Litigation Insights that most captured my imagination. “To view emojis through a one-dimensional lens,” it says, “is to completely underestimate their ability to serve as signifiers of emotion, clarifiers of intent, and even mediators of self-identity.” It’s the last part of the sentence — mediators of self-identity — that inspires conversation.

A study cited on PsychCentral concluded:“If you look at personality traits like agreeableness, it seems to be related to whether you use emojis or not.” (That 74% of people in the U.S. regularly using emojis in their online communication suggests there are many more agreeable people out there than my personal experience would suggest.)

And studies cited in the article Do Emoticons Helps Us to Better Communicate Emotions?, cited competing views. “[They] can help us to convey a sentiment without having to phrase it in a convoluted sentence. They also help to reduce the ambiguity of a message’s meaning among different parties, who generally understand emoticons to have identical meanings.” Yet, “a limited choice of emoticons restricts the range of emotions that we can express and does not allow for the subtle nuances or strengths of emotion that we experience.”

So, I guess the verdict is still out. What do you think? Use emojis only to weigh in.