[astrobe_]

People will also argue that people have used written communication and done without eggplants and whatnot for centuries -- even though it would have been even easier to do so with pen and paper (i.e. free drawing in hand-written letters).

Other people would argue that Emojis are an illusion of communication. People right here are commenting that the difference in their graphic representation on different platforms sometimes change their meaning!?

I would argue that we didn't need anything beyond (basic) ASCII smiley. The rest are toys, not communication devices. When you have dozens of them you need some sort of dictionary, and at this point I suggest you should learn Chinese instead, if you like to write with symbols that much.