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The evolutionary reason why we're so obsessed with emojiStudies suggest we are now more comfortable expressing ourselves with emoji than words. But the power of visual communication has always been vital to our survivalBy?TOM VANDERBILTSaturday 11 February 2017Source: Credit: Edward TuckwellIn a series of lectures at the University of Cambridge in the late 1930s, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein noted the trouble humans can have expressing themselves - particularly when it comes to our feelings about things or people. The use of a word such as "lovely" to describe a piece of art or music was annoyingly muzzy. And yet, he observed, "A lot of people who can't express themselves use the word frequently."?If he were a good draughtsman, Wittgenstein continued, he "could convey an innumerable number of expressions by four strokes". He sketched three simple faces: a smiley face with closed eyes; that same face with a raised eyebrow; and a smiling face with open eyes. "Such words as 'pompous' and 'stately'," he argued, "could be expressed by faces." Far from simplifying our discourse, he suggested, the crude symbols would make it more precise. "In fact, if we want to be exact, we use a gesture or a facial expression."What Wittgenstein was proposing was a sort of proto?emoji?long before such things had permeated our digital consciousness.The ascent of emoji has been astonishing. In Gavin Lucas's?The Story of Emoji, the linguist describes emoji as the fastest-growing language of all time. For instance, when emoji were added to the iOS keyboard in 2011, about ten per cent of?Instagram?posts contained emoji; that figure is now north of 50 per cent. As a study by the Georgia Institute of Technology found, emoji even seem to be crowding out their more primitive cousins, the emoticons, based on an analysis of Twitter usage.From cave walls to keyboards: 'emoji' were first used 200,000 years agoFrom cave walls to keyboards: 'emoji' were first used 200,000 years agoA 2015 survey by Bangor University found that 72 per cent of participants aged between 18 to 25 felt more comfortable expressing themselves using emoji than words. But before tutting about a post-literate generation communicating via smiley faces, we should remember Wittgenstein's emoji.Indeed, the problems of communication he was addressing, well before the computer age, are only magnified in electronic messaging; where, in the absence of facial gestures, intonation, pauses and other contextual cues, our language can seem sterile at best and, at worst, open to misinterpretation (if I sign off with a full-stop, and not an exclamation point, does that seem passively aggressively hostile?). Communicating online is like being in a car and trying to talk to other drivers. Without time for lengthy formalities, generally unable to see each other's faces, we use gestures - a wave, a flash of headlights, a sounded horn.But simple language can be as hard to read as complex language. Were you honking at me? Was it a polite honk, or an angry honk? Inventors have occasionally suggested systems for cars which would display messages - like "sorry" - to other drivers, to help broaden the range of expression.Facebook was, in essence, trying to solve a similar problem when, earlier last year, it unveiled "Reactions", which added "wow" and "sad" emoji, among others, to its original "like". As US magazine n+1 noted, "like" itself was born "as an 'awesome' button, but the company decided that the language of a 'like' translated across cultural vocabularies in a way that 'awesome' didn't." Universal or not, "like" had its limits. When a friend told you of bad news, hitting 'like' - even if you were sure they would get what you meant - felt uncomfortable. "Binary 'like' and 'dislike'," as Facebook's director of product design put it, "doesn't reflect how we react to the vast array of things we encounter in our real lives."And now that "love" has emerged as the most popular response, does a mere "like" seem tepid? And is "reacting" the same as feeling? As Dacher Keltner, part of the University of California team that advised Facebook on Reactions, put it, a tagger could in effect be saying: "I recognise that what you've done could produce this feeling, but I don't necessarily feel it."The power of emoji is their ability to tap into the cognitive architecture for reading facial emotion (smiling and unsmiling faces are so powerful they are routinely used in psychology as unseen "primes" to influence people's response to other things). At least since Charles Darwin, who showed 20 house guests a series of photographs of people and asked them to judge what emotion was being displayed, the legibility and near-universality of facial expression has been known. Darwin thought we had facial expression before language because it was key to our survival - one needed to signal danger, disgust, maybe even joy, before we invented words to go alongside. It was social media 1.0. In this sense, emoji are not a new language, but the oldest one of all. ................
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