> If you don't think that emoji is an expressive language then you may have missed a few years of internet history. ;)
If you think emoji is an expressive language, then I'd like you to make an argument toward that point in emoji.
If you think emoji is an expressive language, then I'd like you to make an argument toward that point in emoji.
1. Emoji only typically exists in the written form, but that isn't really a strike against it: paragraphs, capital letters, and (to some extent) word-breaks only exist in the written form too.
2. They have a conceptual existence, and communicative force, that is separate from any particular representation. You can't copy-write the smiley grapheme. You could copy-write a particular smiley image (or "graph"), much like you could copy-write a glyph, but that's it.
Finally emoji is important for many young children in Japan and China, (I'm not an expert on this). The issue is learning all the characters needed to express yourself is pretty hard and takes years longer than learning the latin alphabet. Further learning how to input characters on a computer takes even longer. However kids still want to communicate with each other and as a result use a lot of emoji to speed up the process for them. For them emjoi is how they want to express themselves.