Are Emojis Making Us Stupid?

The Emoji Movie (a film about the cute icons that are increasingly popular in texting) is in route to be considered the worst film of 2017. It has been universally panned by reviewers. Two main criticisms have been pointed out. First, it’s claimed that the movie is pretty much a mediocre knockoff of Inside Out, the 2015 film about different personified emotions coexisting inside a girl’s mind. Second, it’s claimed that The Emoji Movie is just a long infomercial that shamelessly takes product placement (mostly, phone and app advertisement) to an unprecedented level.

            Both criticisms are true, but not entirely fair. Yes, The Emoji Movie is about different emojis living inside a telephone, and in that sense, it resembles too much the premise of Inside Out. But, long before Inside Out, there was Tron, a 1982 film about a programmer who goes inside his own software. If anything, The Emoji Movie is a knockoff of a knockoff. As for product placement, yes, The Emoji Movie goes over the top. But, is product placement inevitable when it comes to art? Haven’t patrons throughout history in one way or another engaged in product placement in great masterpieces? Isn’t there product placement for the consumption of Catholicism in the Sistine Chapel? Doesn’t Battleship Potemkin advertise Soviet Communist ideology? Yet, no one would deny the artistic value of these works.

            Be that as it may, the truth seems to be that, even if The Emoji Movie corrected its many cinematic flaws, most critics would still pan it. It seems that the very existence of a movie about emojis makes critics uncomfortable. What they seem to hate is not the movie, but rather, the emojis themselves. Their dislike of emojis is ultimately a Luddite rant that relies on the idea that emojis are making us stupid, on two accounts: smartphones are making our lives miserable, and emojis are taking away our capacity for language. In fact, this is far from obvious.

            In the history of technology, almost no invention has appeared, without someone claiming it will bring about terrible consequences, some of them even apocalyptic. In a very popular article, Nichols Carr asked “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” to which he answereda resounding “yes!”. According to Carr, Google’s flood of information is shortening our attention spans, and taking away our capacity for concentration and reflection.

This type of rant is nothing new. The invention of the printing press is universally held as an extremely positive invention. Yet, as soon as it was invented, there were people who feared it. One contemporary of Guttenberg, Conrad Gessner, for example, using arguments very similar to Carr’s regarding Google, complained that the printing press would provide too much information to the common reader, to the point of causing enormous distress. We could even go back 2400 years, when Socrates believed the invention of writing as a catastrophe, as it would deteriorate our capacity for memory.

Smartphones and digital technology as a whole, have been demonized for similar reasons. Susan Greenfield claims spending too much time on gadgets causes ADHD and autism. This is a totally unsupported claim (as irresponsible as claiming that vaccines cause autism), and yet, her views do have some popularity, especially in the anti-capitalist and Neo-Luddite left.

Allegedly, smartphones are causing an alarming rise in depression and anxiety amongst millennials, as they are the culprits of alienation from family members in social gathering. Again, these sensationalist claims are unsupported. It is not clear that millennials are any more depressed than previous generations; perhaps diagnoses are more available now. But even if it were true that millennials are more depressed, there is no concrete evidence that this is caused by the use of smartphones. The opposite actually seems to be the case. Social media expands family and friendship networks, and lonely individuals in the virtual world, are very likely to be lonely individuals in the real world; whereas individuals with many virtual friends tend to have stronger connections with real friends.

If anything, smartphones are empowering youngsters to a degree never seen before in history. Information is power, and as Ray Kurzweil reminds us, today, a Third World adolescent has more access to information than the US president did less than two decades ago. Smartphones enable youngsters to expand their views beyond traditional provincial limits, into a far more cosmopolitan approach to life. Philosopher Miguel de Unamuno famously claimed that fascism is cured by reading and racism is cured by travelling. The smartphone may very well serve both purposes.

Critics seem to hate emojis, not only because they are sent via smartphones, but also, because they impoverish language. Kids no longer want to write meaningful words, so the argument goes, and emojis are making them lazy. According to critics, kids are becoming increasingly stupid, as they lose the ability for abstraction. Instead of texting a poem about love, they just send a happy face or the image of a heart, (or, for that matter, the poop emoji, certainly one of the most popular). The lack of symbols for abstract concepts in emoji script limits kids’ ability to think about these concepts.

Most of these critics do not seem to be aware that these arguments are nothing new. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, the so-called “Toronto School of Communication Theory” (its foremost representative was the eminent Marshall McLuhan) sought to analyze the impact of media technologies on the way we think. One of its theses was that ideographic script (of which emojis are now one type) limited the capacity for abstraction and communication, whereas the alphabet dramatically expanded both abstraction and communication. According to this argument, the alphabet expresses concepts not by pictographic representation, but rather by representation of sounds, and this expands abstraction, as there is no intrinsic relationship between the sign and what it represents. Furthermore, by using combinations of a small set of characters, the alphabet can infinitely expand the possibilities of communication, whereas ideographic script has to use one character per each concept, ultimately being constrained.

These arguments have been ingenious, but not convincing. China continues to use ideographic script, and yet, its growth as a world power is expanding. Furthermore, as opposed to the alphabet, ideographic script has some virtues that the Toronto School of Communication Theory did not seem to take into account. Ideographic script is able to unite cultures with different languages. That is why Chinese was so attractive to Leibniz and the other philosophers who dreamed of a universal language. These philosophers also appreciated in Chinese and other ideographic scripts, the possibility of building concepts through combination in a more logical way, something alphabets are not so apt at doing.

A universal, totally logic language is still a phantasy. But, it is nevertheless true that emojis improve communication. The alphabet leaves many aspects out: sarcasm, tone, emotions, etc. Emojis easily fill this void. Emojis will not replace words, but will complement them. Emojis, far from making us more stupid, are actually integrating the best of both ideographic and phonetic script. And, they are doing so with the help of a gadget that, contrary to the Luddite rant, is bringing people closer together.