Clo S. of This Too Shall Grow went two weeks without using emojis and chronicled her experiment:
On the first day of my experiment, I was already worrying that I wasn’t warm enough, or wasn’t conveying my reactions well enough. On the second day, I missed using emojis. It hadn’t even been 48 hours, but the good stuff comes when you push through, so I kept at it. On the third day, finally, I started feeling good about this. I wrote:
“This is actually cool, I don’t know if I want to get back to emojis. Maybe I just needed to get the habit out of my system.”
No shit, Sherlock.
In the first few days, I did have to edit emojis out of my messages, as I was using them reflexively. During this experiment, I pondered about the importance of emojis to convey banter, being concerned that without them, I’d simply come across as mean.
I could probably do two weeks but it’d be tough and I’d worry if I was coming across as cold and distant. But if you asked me to stop saying “lol” and “haha” at the end of sentences? Big struggle. I was talking to a friend the other day who’d asked me how I was and we talked about how we used “lol” to cushion the blow of expressing less-than-pleasant feelings. It’s a crutch, for sure, and emojis add a certain flavour to our digital conversations, for good or bad.
Japanese culture related: ‘Repro Japan’ and how Japanese culture has influenced the rest of the world, ‘I’m just experiencing Japanese culture’, and Fumi Ishino’s ‘Index of Fillers’