Not only is the emoji a political topic, as I just tried to point out, it also has social consequences: When I started to learn reading, there were books that contained pictures instead of the nouns. So that the child could say the main words, while the parents would read the rest of it. A sentence was build like this:

This means „Santa Claus heard the bell ring and knew immediately that the children were waiting for the presents“. With this method, children can participate in the reading process and slowly understand that the signs in-between the pictures have a meaning as well. #Storybehindthekeyword

To read these pictures with their intended meaning, one needs a certain background, which Pierre Bourdieu calls „habitus“. It describes the preferences and dispositions of an individual. The habitus influences the way of thinking, the actions and the #perception of individuals. The habitus itself is shaped by the social field, in which the actor stands. So your habitus decides whether or not you can understand certain meanings. If one never ever saw an emoji, I doubt that he would understand it from the very beginning onwards. The reading and producing of the new kinds of communication is a medial process, in which one has to grow into. My generation and especially the kids nowadays grew up with the internet and with smart phones. But it is not a matter of course that everyone can use and especially understand the different codes the new communication comes along with. The first emoji in the example above can be read as „an old man with a beard wearing a red hat“ or as „Santa Claus“. It depends on your habitus whether you can decode this emoji in the intended way.

As I already pointed out, the emojis are little pictures, and thus have to get interpreted. During this process, they get confronted by cultural differences. If you want to speak in the terms of Cultural Studies invented by Stuart Hall in 1964, you can clearly see that Emojis are a subject of the encoding-decoding-process: this model says that a message is encoded from the writer with certain aspects, depending on knowledge, the technical infrastructure and the conditions of production of the writer. That means that the message has to get decoded from the reader. But this decoding again is shaped from knowledge, the technical infrastructure and the conditions of production of the reader. So it is not obligatory, that the message is understood in the same way the writer wanted it to. So of course Emojis can underline a message or a post, but maybe the reader has a different understanding of this special sign.

Both of these aspects - Bourdieu’s habitus and Hall’s Cultural Studies - lead to a subject of the history of arts: Panofsky’s tripartite theory of analysis of symbols, iconography and iconology. And what else is an emoji if not a „painting“ that has to get interpreted? The usage of this method would first just describe the thing you see. To stick with the example above, this would be the „old man with a beard wearing a red hat“. The next step, called iconography, targets the meaning behind the things you see. The emoji shows Santa Claus, a figure in the Christian world that appears on the 24th or 25th of December (depending on the country, but its during the Christmas Days) to bring presents to the children. The last step to analyze an emoji would be the iconology - the understanding of the usage and surroundings of the „artist“. In this case, there is no real artist because everyone has the same symbols and emojis are not newly produced everytime someone uses one. But still, you can illustrate the present situation. That means that first of all you recognize the sign as an emoji. Then, one can show the usage of the emojis: they are small symbols to put in context with a written text (mostly messages to another person), so that the meaning of the text is highlighted. Again, the observer needs a certain experience and knowledge to understand the painted circumstances. These elements are either gained during studies or just during living - so Bourdieu’s habitus and Hall’s Decoding plays a role again.

You see - a small thing like an emoji isn’t just a small thing free of consequences. It has social, political, scientific and artistic significance.

So nowadays, not only children but grown-ups as well use signs again instead of „real“ words. But is it a step backwards? Or is this just a sign of the changing society in terms of how you live your life? Is it the inner child that has to be satisfied or is it an urge to show everything with pictures instead of words? There is this huge impulse on showing everything you see and experience in the world with photos. The best example for that is Instagram. And these pictures on Instagram might even be described and commented by emojis, which are smaller pictures. So you have an explanation for pictures that consist of pictures.

There are some people that complain about it in the internet. For example, there is this new page called „Instagram Husbands“ which shows the men behind the cute instagram girls. C. Nichols also thinks of himself as an instagram husband and writes: "She only speaks in emojis now, which is difficult, because my first language is human.“