> emoji's are part of text communication in the same way facial expressions and body language are part of oral communication.

That's exactly what emoticons were meant to substitute: non-verbal communication. The problem is that some use them as hieroglyphs.

This is descriptive vs prescriptive linguistics. It's up for debate whether or not using emojis as hieroglyphs is a problem.

> The problem is that some use them as hieroglyphs.

Well, that's those people's problem. They won't be able to communicate with anybody outside of their group, so they must eventually give the style away or learn to tone it down when talking to strangers.

Not differently from any other kind of group idiom people created at any time in history.

Why is that a problem? I quite enjoy conversations that spell out words using emoji. I admit it may take me a few milliseconds longer to make sense of a hieroglyphic emoji then a spelled out word, but there is some satisfaction involved and I hear a different—more joyful—tone in the sentence.

> I hate to say this but you might be old and out of touch

I think you're jumping to conclusions too quickly. It is true, emojis can be an important part of communication but until the same graphics start being used on all platforms, devices and services, emojis are a quite bad medium for communication. My phone, my browser, whatsapp, slack, I think twitter too and so on use their own graphics™ which have subtle differences.

They are widely used, which is actually more important than them being used well. Because it's much easier to fix the problem you described than it is to adopt a new communication style as a species. Unicode may be silly, but it's clearly a step we are taking together in communication style.

This honestly reminds me how on skype (for business) or Lync, where people would type strange messages to me that I didn't understand, but in skype/lync apparently it was transformed into a thumbs up emote; I was using pidgin/sipe which didn't do this. I'd say for the most part, at least Emojis generally work everywhere I need them and I even get the hatching representations in most VT100-like emulators. the worst case I've seen is some of my environments cannot handle the modifiers, which honestly doesn't matter. I can see the symbols and reconstruct what they mean myself.