We’ve been enhancing our digital communications with graphics pretty much since we started typing things out instead of writing them down.
Specialized emoji keyboards on our phones are nice, but back in the day we made up our own when conversational nuances weren’t sufficiently expressed by standard use of alphanumeric characters.
From the humble :) to reimagining classic works of literature explained entirely in emoji, we’re just continuing the millennia-old practice of pictographic communications.
We speed up texting by replacing words with emojis. We add interpersonal context back into text-based emails or chat conversations with the appropriate smiley face or witty gif. And graphics-enhanced “speech” isn’t just limited to conversations with your friends anymore. It can actually be an important part of work culture.
Pretty much anyone who’s been on, y’know, the Internet, knows that text-based communication is pretty limited. It loses a lot of nuance, and can lead to hurt feelings, miscommunications, and other human foibles.
Our brains are just not (yet) designed to process text-based communication the same way we do when we’re face-to-face. (There’s also that issue of people forgetting all their manners, but I digress …)
Using text to try and add back lost nuance has been a clunky attempt at improvement. Once upon a time you would sometimes bracket text with fake HTML tags denoting a <rant> <sarcasm> or <joke>, for example.
Emojis let us achieve the same thing, just with greater range of explanation and bringing back some of the visual cues a face-to-face conversation would have. Why we defaulted to round, yellow cartoon faces I don’t know.
Certainly, there are still professional settings contexts and audiences for which using emojis probably isn’t a great idea. Although it’s interesting that your financial advisor likely wouldn’t use a bunch of emojis with you, since it was for accounting purposes that humans invented writing in the first place.
Typically companies’ external communications are a fair bit more formal than internal comms, regardless of company size or industry. That said, there are some hints of change on that front. I’ve received more than one customer newsletter that uses emojis in the subject line, and occasionally in the body of the message.
Sure, you’re still more likely to see it among tech companies that want to project a hip, casual image than from your insurance company, but it’s entirely possible that could change in the future. (There could well be far more hip insurance companies than mine.)
One benefit of emoji-friendly communication is that, while not a universal language, it can be more broadly collectively understood among speakers/readers of various languages. As long as you’re working with emojis where the literal and contextual meaning of the symbols is fairly widely known across linguistic groups or cultures, you can communicate in a way that better shares nuances of tone, humour, and can feel more inclusive.
I’m no scientist or early childhood educator, but I also wonder if wide-scale use of emojis can advance kids’ digital communication skills earlier. I know my nieces understood what to do with a phone screen full of icons well before they could read. Emojis (and gifs?) could be an introduction to the complexities of conversation and communication before they learn a more formal written/spoken language.
Casual use of graphics like emojis and gifs can be a big part of internal communication and development of corporate culture at companies. As tools like Slack proliferate, it makes it super easy to add these graphical elements to conversations.
Adding your team’s own custom emojis is really an exercise in building out your own language and team culture shorthand database. (Last week my colleague wanted an emoji for “ruthless efficiency,” which sent me down a rabbit hole of pictures from Monty Python’s “Spanish Inquisition” sketch…)
Being able to read through text and graphics and understand the message, nuances, and in-jokes offers an increased sense of team cohesion and belonging. It’s a reminder of shared experiences. Jokes or good-natured insults also tend to be funnier when administered in gif form ....
That said, new hires and such are, by default, denied access to this club initially until they learn the lingo and make their own contributions. And there will likely always be “had to be there” type jokes or phrases that they’ll never really get, even if the general meaning is explained to them. But ideally over time they add new contributions to the “database.”
Use of emojis or gifs can also divest people from responsibility and the actual impact of their words in situations of supplying feedback or criticism. It’s easy to add an emoji-centric reaction to someone’s question, problem, or work. But it doesn’t actually provide very much useful information, unless all you’re trying to say is, “Great job!”
At worst it’s downright unprofessional and hostile. Sure, you could graphically communicate that something wasn’t done well or you don’t agree with a decision, but … so what? It might seem to you like you’re gentling the feedback by using nice, chipper graphics, but you would be the only one with that idea. To others it comes off as passive aggressive or flippant.
What specifically do you have a problem with? How do you recommend improvement? Did you even have skin in the game in this particular project? Just dropping in a snarky emoji or gif is … cheap.
It’s basically a form of seagulling, i.e., where “someone comes into your work, shits all over it, and then flies away.” It doesn’t improve the project, team productivity, morale, or anyone’s impression of you as a teammate any more than it helps if management does it. Unsurprisingly, none of my colleagues has requested a seagull emoji.
It might seem frivolous, but the potential of graphics-based digital communication is fascinating to consider. After all, think about the importance of well-designed graphics in communication in the real world: road signs, airport navigation, etc.
Those of us who write in cursive are technically a dying breed, since it’s no longer taught in schools in many places. Perhaps texting, online chatting, and other digital communications using full sentences, capitalization, and punctuation is on the same downward usage trajectory.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
