By Imlisanen Jamir
The Face with Tears of Joy emoji has become the most recognisable expression of our times—digital shorthand for laughter, relief, irony, even passive aggression. It’s on WhatsApp groups, official government tweets, apology posts, and obituaries. Somewhere along the way, it stopped meaning anything.
Keith Houston’s new book, Face with Tears of Joy: A Natural History of Emoji, tracks the journey of these little yellow faces from late-1990s Japanese mobile phones to the global stage of digital communication. His argument is clear: emoji aren’t a new language, but a set of tools that mask our growing inability—or unwillingness—to actually say what we mean.
Emoji started out simple: a way to convey tone in an environment where tone was easily lost. But over the years, they’ve grown into something much bigger and much shallower. We use them to end uncomfortable conversations, to signal friendliness where none exists, to wrap bluntness in humour. A red heart doesn’t always mean love. A crying-laughing face doesn’t always mean joy.
Houston digs into the strange politics behind these icons. Each emoji must pass through the Unicode Consortium, a committee of tech industry representatives that decides which symbols make it into the global standard. It’s a system as dry and bureaucratic as it sounds. Want to propose a menstruation emoji or a woman in a turban? There’s a long form for that. The process is technical, slow, and remarkably out of touch with how people actually communicate.
Despite their appearance, emoji are anything but spontaneous. They’re curated and controlled—approved by coders and marketers long before they land on your keyboard. And yet we treat them as natural extensions of ourselves.
That’s the uncomfortable truth Houston nudges us toward: we didn’t invent emoji, we adopted them. And in doing so, we gave up more than we gained. Our emotional range online is now filtered through a limited set of faces, gestures, and hearts in various colours. We’ve reduced grief, celebration, and anxiety to a unicode. The result is a universal language that says very little.
The deeper issue isn’t the emoji themselves, but what they represent—a culture increasingly obsessed with speed, efficiency, and ambiguity. We reach for symbols because they’re faster than words. Because typing out what we really feel takes too long and risks too much. Emoji let us perform emotion without confronting it.
Houston doesn’t claim we should abandon emojis altogether. But he makes a convincing case that their rise coincides with the slow erosion of actual communication. When we choose a picture over a sentence, a reaction over a response, we’re not just simplifying—we’re shrinking our capacity for connection.
Emoji won’t kill language. But they may help us forget how to use it.
Comments can be sent to imlisanenjamir@gmail.com
