Are Emoticons and Emojis affecting written communication

Are we losing our written communication to emoticons and emoji.

So yeah we use at least 1 funny little icon in our conversations everyday. Emoticons and Emoji do make it easy sometimes because if you are short of words, don’t know how to respond, not interested in writing back, throw in an emoticon and you are good to go. But do they really express our emotions, i don’t think so. It’s a shortcut we use, rather creative one but it is a shortcut.

A smiley face denotes i am happy but wouldn’t it be better if i write i am happy and why am happy, add more meaning and feeling in the conversation. A sad emoticon shows i am sad but there are different level’s of sadness and why i am sad, what made me sad, a simple crying face won’t explain that. I use emoticons myself sometimes and i have realized i just do that because i am too lazy or busy to actually acknowledge what the other person said which is wrong. If i want to say i love you to someone rather sending the heart i should at least do the effort of writing three words. Of course they visuals help, but as long as they are used with the words.

We have already disconnected ourselves from face to face communication because now we have so many social networks for online communication and texting and chats and what not. Human communication has some important elements and they are all lost within the keypads and behind high resolution screens.

Emoji and emoticons bring back the historic way of communication no doubt, history shows that ancient people used pictography and hieroglyphic for communication and after thousands of years of evolution we are doing just that.

Decades back little did Scott Fahlman knew that his experiment could become a revolution. Use of emoticons and Emoji does help to have faster communication and adds fun also not to forget the universal understanding of symbols that can help communication. But i feel they do have limits, they can’t convey what we really mean, so we should use them in the text and not the other way round.