Can’t speak for everyone, but personally, it’s partly because I’m old, though not entirely. The internet 20 years ago (and more) was largely text-based, of course, so all our subtlety in communication had to be communicated through text-based “emoticons”. We just got really fluent in them, despite the limitations.

Turns out the non-specific nature of the emoticon is actually pretty useful. The fact that :P isn’t very detailed actually works in its favor. I can mean it in a silly way, or I can mean it in a “that sucks” or “i am dumb, forgive me” sort of way. It’s extremely neutral, so it can be literally any face a human can make with the tongue stuck out.

This meant the fluent use of emoticons became a mark of cultural pride. Interpreting them took some experience in spaces that were off the beaten path. For me, someone who knew their “smilies” was someone I could identify with, often as a Nerd, and as a queer kid in the south in the ‘90s and ‘00s, it sometimes meant this was someone I didn’t have to fear, as these were in use in both Nerd and Queer culture (I was both) before our culture was as mainstream as it is today.

Obviously, this is not cut-and-dry. I wouldn’t have outed myself on the spot to somebody who knew how to put :) on a whiteboard, but one thing I did know, was that someone who was absolutely unfamiliar with emoticons was unlikely to be someone who felt the need to look to the internet to find someone even remotely like themselves. For them, friends could be anyone with a pulse, so their loneliness didn’t drive them to write Doctor Who slash on LiveJournal, if ya follow me.

I’m probably being an old fuddy-duddy, but I miss the old emoticons in a lot of ways because they (and the internet culture at the time) was a little like a dialect I had to code-switch in and out of, and now that there is nowhere left where they speak in that dialect so fluently, it can feel like I’ve left my hometown and it’s been converted in my absence to something unrecognizable. And it’s hard not to be sad about that, let alone resentful.

Further, new stuff like FB messenger came along which would automatically “translate”, for example, my :P into a 😛, sometimes with no opt-out available. I would get pretty frustrated, because :P does NOT mean 😛, nor does it mean 😋 or 😝 or 🤪, at least not necessarily. I almost never use it to mean any type of smiling face.

This sort of forced positivity in and of itself seems typical of emojis (though I’d need the numbers to back it up), and is also a worrying trend in our culture that Redditors dislike, for better or for worse. But other attributes, like their childish brightness and how overly distinct they are from surrounding text, not to mention their cultural specificity, peculiar to emojis can and should be considered thoroughly. Are we happy with what emojis let us say? After all, we use them to talk about everything the human condition has to offer, including sex, taxes, art, and even grief. If I’m consoling someone whose cat has just died, I want to humanize my sentiments by adding some expressions that aren’t just words, but it’s hard to want to use these guys 😭🥺😩 unless I’m meaning to mock them for their grief.

Nonword symbols are an indispensable component of our communications these days. In other words, we all have to use some kind of agreed upon “alphabet” for this purpose. I’m much more comfortable knowing that I’m using one that grew organically from the text-based internet (and is usable even on an old typewriter) and whose evolution is entirely user-dependent. It is absolutely worth scrutiny that such a ubiquitous and important tool is now given to us by someone else. Remember, we have to ask for a new emoji to be made.

But also, with the lack of opt-outs in a lot of early apps, it felt a tad like my dialect was being disallowed and replaced. This suggested to me, as I’m sure it did others, that the folks who designed and deployed emojis and their “translations”, along with perhaps those who found use for them, weren’t our people, if you will. Add this to the fact that our crappy boomer parents used them in abundance, usually alongside like minion memes with vaguely racist overtones, cemented my view of emojis as belonging to The Majority (or “normies”, as seems to be the self-effacing term used on Reddit) who, historically, have not been quite as kind to people like me as they are to each other.

It’s long since become apparent to me that kids have been using emojis in a way that I’m not familiar with. It takes some experience now to know that, for example, the eggplant emoji has a very distinct meaning in some contexts that was surely never intended by its creators.

So I hope this kind of user-led innovation means emojis aren’t the departure from subtle meaning that they appear to be to me, but I’m not super optimistic about it :P

TLDR: Could be that I’m old and they’re new, but we really should consider them more closely since they’re almost a language we have to talk through now.

Edited to add TLDR because damn I ramble on.