Have you ever been misunderstood on social media? Have you ever tried irony online? In an email? And got it completely wrong?
If your answer to any of the above is a resounding ‘yes’, then congratulations, you’ve had the same problem as everyone else trying to say something online without coming across like C3PO.
And no wonder – some claim that only 7% of communication is the actual content of speech, that is: words, and that 38% is tone of voice and 55% body language.
ONLY 7% OF COMMUNICATION IS THE ACTUAL CONTENT OF WORDS.
38% IS TONE OF VOICE AND 55% IS BODY LANGUAGE.
Enter the emoji
Words on a page or on a screen, written by an average communicator, are very poor representations of what we want to say or get across.
But if we do a bit like the Egyptians and add a few emojis here and there and pepper it all with some exclamation marks, we might at least be not misunderstood. And that’s something.
Exit the purists
Many a time I’ve been told by email purists (read: older people), that: if they ever see as much as an exclamation mark in an email they’ll delete it no questions asked.
But when you’ve been misunderstood one too many times and really just want to get the whole thing over with, the exclamation mark is a God-send. It tells your interlocutor everything’s all right – that they can relax and move one. And so can you.
The purists are having a hard time these days. Even I have started accepting emails written with no capital letters.
Moby or Emoji Dick?
The New York Times recently reported that Moby Dick has now been turned into Emoji Dick, all translated by Amazon Mechanical Turk. This might prove a water-shed in modern linguistics (though you might need the Emoji Dictionary to get the full force of the narrative)
All this to say that: Instead of clinging to our old letters we should now be very happy that we have more strings to our bows when we want to say something pertinent.
As the famous saying goes: (thumbs up) + (helmet) + (sad face)