I was shocked and dismayed to realise, a few years ago, that I was going to have to watch The Emoji Movie, which was made in 2017 by a mobile phone company, Sony, to promote the use of mobile phones by children. To my great regret, I allowed the film – comfortably among the worst pieces of entertainment ever made – to play in its entirety. I wish I had done something more rational, and enjoyable, such as beating myself unconscious with a frozen haddock. I do not think it is unreasonable to describe The Emoji Movie as an act of cultural terrorism, an attempt to spread hopelessness and anhedonia among all the people on whom it was inflicted. The people who made the film were clearly recruited to do so by a foreign power (America) with the intention of eroding other cultures, making us doubt the value of art itself. Anyone involved in the making of it is pure evil, and in a just, well-run world they would never work again.
The same is not true of Face with Tears of Joy, Keith Houston’s story of the rise of the emoji. (The title refers to the crying-laughing emoji, which is used more than any other.) It is an intelligent, historical account of a cultural phenomenon. But, like the grotesque crime that is The Emoji Movie, it raises questions: for whom do the emoji work? What power do they hold?
In 2016, Tom Wolfe published his last book, The Kingdom of Speech. It tells of the search among scientists for an understanding of language, from the point at which Alfred Russel Wallace described it – and the abstract thought it makes possible – as the basis for man’s ascent from the state of nature. “Speech”, Wolfe writes, was “the primal artifact. Without speech the human beast couldn’t have created any other artifacts, not the crudest club or the simplest hoe, not the wheel or the Atlas rocket.” It is the basis for mathematics – try counting to ten without using words, Wolfe writes – and trade, farming, science, society, religion. Most of all, it is the basis of the self.
As Wittgenstein pointed out, when we think in words – when we think to ourselves I’d like a strawberry, or Martin doesn’t look happy, or what is this bloke going on about – these words aren’t accompanied by separate thoughts, holding the meanings the words refer to. The words are the thoughts. “Language itself”, as Wittgenstein put it, “is the vehicle of thought”.
People do not think in emoji. I disagree with Houston’s description of emoji as “the world’s newest language”. They are not language at all. The emoji set is a collection of phatic expressions which can be used to convey social context and emotion, like the mooing of cows. But they do not have any real semantic significance. They are just pictures of things. They do not combine into greater context. Sometimes – the peach, the aubergine – they can mean two things, but in general they mean what they mean.
Compare them, as Houston does, to the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt – weren’t they just pictures, too? No. Hieroglyphs were an alphabet of sounds and meanings that could be mixed to create far more complex structures of thought. A picture of an eye did not just mean “eye”; it meant a sound, a component of meaning, a signifier of cultural significance, heavy with the weight of all the things it had meant over the centuries. It could invoke the gods Ra and Horus. It was capable of being ordered into a practically endless branching complexity of thought. The same cannot be said of a little picture of a smiling cartoon turd.
And yet the emoji are in constant use, billions of them teeming through the air, a river of thumbs and smiles and hearts and fruit. What for? And what is that doing to us?
In the mid 1990s, Keiichi Enoki, a manager at the Japanese telephone company DoCoMo noticed how easily and capably his young children played with a pager. Pagers were very popular in Japan, and a kind of slang that used numbers as shorthand for words had evolved; three nines, when read out in Japanese – san kyu – sounded a bit like the English “thank you”, for example. DoCoMo had previously failed to understand the potential this represented, but what Keiichi understood from watching his children play with technology was you could not be too patronising, too infantilising. Keiichi incorporated a set of icons – pictograms saved as text, rather than images – into his i-mode web browser, making it simple and kawaii (cute). The effect was transformative; i-mode had a million subscribers within six months. Keitai phones – equipped with basic internet service – spread across Japan.
When the iPhone was released in 2007 the then-CEO of Microsoft, Steve Ballmer, laughed. “It doesn’t have a keyboard,” he chuckled. Who would pay for that? Ballmer had failed to see what Keiichi had seen, which was that people liked simpler interfaces. The iPhone was a design that could be understood immediately by a young child. There was only one button you could press. This logic would be extended to the iPad, a laptop screen on which it was impractical to type. The apps were little cartoon versions of things – an envelope, a calendar – and from 2010, when emoji were added to Unicode, messages could be composed without even using words.
The rising use of emoji combined with the widespread use of other means of phatic communication – the poke, the like, the retweet – allowed people to communicate emotion, mass approval or disapproval, in ever greater volumes, without actually saying anything. In 2014, a new social network was launched called Yo. Users could only send each other a single word: “yo”. It was meant as a joke – it opened on 1 April – but tens of thousands of people joined and the developers raised millions of dollars before it folded. In 2018, BuzzFeed News asked its readers to respond to questions about that year’s midterm elections using emojis. People who worried about gun violence and the climate crisis registered their political sentiment by submitting little pictures of frowny faces, water pistols and rainbow flags.
Karl Marx wrote that technology changes how people interact with the world and each other, and emoji are part of the story of a world that is becoming less literate. They represent language that can be more fun, but which is also, by accident or by design, trimmed of its semantic content, made phatic. And perhaps made less powerful and more easily directed too. Some of us may read a warning in Louis MacNeice’s strange, prophetic little poem, “To Posterity” (1957), in which he imagined a time when: “reading and even speaking have been replaced/By other, less difficult, media”, and wonders “if you/Will find in flowers and fruit the same colour and taste/They held for us for whom they were framed in words.”
To be fair, The Emoji Movie may not really have been the act of a deranged cabal of art criminals bent on destroying our culture. But emoji themselves may represent something darker: a shift to communicating without context, to being reduced to simpler and more emotional responses. Every day, more and more people allow chatbots to intercede in their word-making, and it is not hard to imagine a time when the companies who run these machines have a far greater command of human speech, emotion and behaviour. They will run the world then, and all we’ll be able to say about it is: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Face with Tears of Joy: A Natural History of Emoji
Keith Houston
WW Norton, 224pp, £14.99
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[See also: On freedom vs motherhood]
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This article appears in the 23 Jul 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Kemi Isn’t Working