More Than Just a Smiley Face: How Emojis Can Affect Communication

Contact: Shelby Cefaratti-Bertin, Baylor University Media & Public Relations, 254-327-8012
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Smiley faces, hearts, thumbs up and folded hands – those are just a few of the thousands of emojis that are available for internet users to communicate with. World Emoji Day, celebrated on July 17 in honor of the calendar emoji dated the same, is a day to consider how these symbols can perfectly emphasize ideas and convey emotions quickly and creatively when words alone often cannot.

With approximately 92% of online communicators using emojis daily through texting, emailing and social media, Baylor University communications and rhetoric professor Scott J. Varda, Ph.D., who researches how rhetoric shapes public culture, offers his insight on how and why people use emojis in modern communication and the misunderstandings that can often come with their usage. 

An emoji may be defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as a “small digital image or icon used to express an idea, emotion, etc., in electronic communications,” but while Varda said emojis may appear to be “simple pictographic representations of images from the physical world… that convey information or meaning, about people, things, places, ideas, or emotions,” that definition is more complicated when looking at from a communication studies view. 

How are emojis used? 

Emojis do convey basic ideas, but “they also include abstract ideas or emotions,” Varda said. He suggested that a deeper look at the nature of communication and language helps uncover the understood meaning of the symbols and how they morph with usage and time. 

“A distinct language is a system of arbitrary symbols that the users of those symbols have collectively agreed upon as a community,” he said. “This means that language is necessarily contextual and almost always changing and just as non-emoji symbolic language often changes meaning with different groups and over time, so can emoji-based communication be just as unstable.” 

How have emojis changed communication?

Emojis present additional ways of “conveying meaning,” Varda said, but also risk additional miscommunication based on differences in understanding and interpretation.

“At their finest, emojis can convey an entire sentence or set of emotions with one character,” he said. “At their worst, emojis can convey a set of meanings far from, and potentially even the opposite of, their intended meaning.”

As an example, the “thumbs up” is one of the most popular and also one of the most disagreed upon meanings, Varda said. “Some older emoji users think of the thumbs-up emoji as conveying ‘I agree,’ ‘good work’ or ‘it’s a plan!’ – while younger emoji users understand the same emoji as denoting a passive-aggressive, sarcastic or even outright rude response.” 

With the possibility of misunderstandings, why are emojis still so popular? 

Varda said research suggests that emojis conveying positive emotions actually do three things:

• Enhance the emotional state of the receiver.
• Increase the perceived persuasiveness of the overall message.
• Strengthen the credibility of the sender or more strongly bind the imagined connections between sender and receiver.

“Conversely, negatively perceived emojis – either from “misuse” or actual communication of negative feelings – can also hurt a message’s effectiveness,” Varda said. “In other words, emojis are powerful linguistic tools that offer advantages over text-based communication efforts and risks not accrued by text-based communication.” 

“Each new emoji offers the promise of better conveying meaning… but also risks misunderstanding”

New emojis, new meanings

Each year new emojis are proposed and introduced, often voted on by the public. At this point, there are thousands of emoji options to express almost any idea. 

“As a rhetorician, each new emoji offers the promise of better conveying meaning, more strongly explaining argument and more accurately capturing emotion, but also risks misunderstanding,” Varda said. “It’s similar to each new word added to a language. The increasing range of emojis is a simultaneous cause for excitement and caution.”

ABOUT SCOTT J. VARDA, PH.D. 

Scott J. Varda, Ph.D., is an associate professor of communication at Baylor. He researches how rhetoric influences public cultures by focusing on texts (speeches, books, newspapers, movies, websites and social media) that shape cultural understandings of race, gender, class, and (dis)ability. His work has appeared in numerous communication outlets, including Argumentation & Advocacy, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Rhetoric & Public Affairs, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, and Contemporary Argumentation & Debate. And his favorite emojis are the heart, laugh/cry and the eye roll 😁.

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