Why are you so intent on invalidating other people when they say that emoji help them communicate?
Am I not allowed to disagree with a statement that implies emojis are some groundbreaking form of communication? I never said the concept was not useful; I said that images provide nothing text cannot aside from aesthetics. Why are you people so defensive about this?
Because you have observed that emojis do not help you communicate, and then concluded that emojis cannot possibly help anyone communicate. There are lots of people in this thread who have mentioned concrete examples of emojis "providing something text cannot," and yet you refuse to accept it.
"This helps me communicate" is not a falsifiable claim. You're telling lots of people that they have somehow made a mistake in interpreting their own life experiences. You are not even considering the possibility that something is there, and you just can't see it.
They are an improvement to an existing form of communication. Aesthetics are also a form of communication. Emojis can be used as part of a sentence and there is no way to communicate exactly the same thing without using them.
There has never been a way to put images in a sentence as easy and expressive as emoji (all there used to be was fonts like Wingdings), and it’s standardized. That is quite revolutionary.
Yeah, figured that would be trotted out at some point. That's a fine sounding argument, but do you really feel emoji's are on the same level as the advent of video? I don't believe you do. At some point you have to take a look at the specific thing you're talking about and get down out of the clouds.
I have yet to hear a reasonable argument as to why emoji's are better. All I see here is "they're different and can be funny." Ok.