I was doubtful of emojis at first, but now I'm loving the concept. They really help me communicate emotions that I wouldn't put into actual words. Smileys can't really do that.
Culturally I see it as a the first universal (limited) language, using standardized ideograms. Maybe in a few decades we can express full sentences and we will have a written language for all Humans to use. 21st century hieroglyphs.
As a college student, I use emoji constantly to communicate all sorts of abstract sentiments, but in my experience they can also be irritatingly ambiguous and highly dependent on cultural norms and interpretation.
Take the thumbs up emoji - within my social circles, the exact same emoji can be interpreted both as a enthusiastic agreement ("Sure!") and also as a sarcastic affirmation ("Good for you.").
It's often difficult to infer the intended meaning, even with context, and in some circumstances I've found emojis have actually added significantly to the ambiguity and cognitive burden in parsing a text. That's not a problem I have often faced with simple smileys.
There have been attempts a universal language that are quite fascinating. There's an interesting RadioLab on the subject of Bissymbols. I suppose the one that sticks and evolves over time is the one that probably matters though.
http://unicode.org/emoji/charts/full-emoji-list.html
I was doubtful of emojis at first, but now I'm loving the concept. They really help me communicate emotions that I wouldn't put into actual words. Smileys can't really do that.
Culturally I see it as a the first universal (limited) language, using standardized ideograms. Maybe in a few decades we can express full sentences and we will have a written language for all Humans to use. 21st century hieroglyphs.