Carly Buxton, PhD

When I was neck-deep in translation theory as a graduate student in East Asian Languages and Civilizations, one of my favorite points to opine on (and to impress upon my students) was that in Japanese, the use of pictographic kanji (characters) in the writing system means that a glance at the page could convey–if even on a subliminal level–a certain feeling or visceral essence of the context of the text itself. For example, a page with a story about water or the seaside “feels wet” to a reader, because the characters and radicals conveying “water” words sprinkle themselves across the page.

When I was teaching and studying this material (in like 2012), we didn’t really have a parallel for this pictorial conveyance of essence in the English language. But now we most certainly do, and we’re seeing more and more of it, thanks to the proliferation of chatGPT: emojis.

ChatGPT loves to pepper its outputs with emojis. Ask it for an Instagram caption or request tweaks to a LinkedIn post or a blog article: the result will undoubtedly contain unexpected emojis as both punctuation and for emphasis or infusions of cadence throughout the piece itself. The downside of this is that the overabundance of emojis is a dead giveaway that someone used AI to generate their content. You know what I’m talking about: that colleague of yours from years ago is posting daily on LinkedIn (it me), and their tone is uncharacteristically dripping with cutesy little images of painter’s palettes, chefs, or rockets. So you roll your eyes and feel superior for being able to write a couple of paragraphs without help from Sam Altman. 

I still (of course) use chatGPT. More Claude these days, really. But I’ve taken to extracting the emojis from the output so as not to cue my audience that I, too, am dancing with the AI devil.

But I’m here to say today that the heavy use of emojis in e-communication is actually a wonderful advancement and one that I hope people will grow habituated to. Why? Well, like the radicals and core imagery of a writing system like kanji, the pictograms offered by emoji can do important work to convey subtle nuances that too often get lost in online written communication.

In the research I’ve done on behalf of telesupport providers seeking to grow deeper, more trusting connections with virtual clients, I’ve written extensively about the need to compensate for the loss of in-person feedback in virtual communication. As helpful as digital communication has been to the continuity of care throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, it robs us of crucial avenues for forging strong relationships and for getting our point across accurately: “real” eye contact, the nuances of tone and body language, the comfort of a reassuring touch, and more. Particularly in the era of remote work and surrounding ourselves in the asynchronous virtaul content of our colleagues, we are too often losing verbal nuances (tone, volume) non-verbal cues (gaze, body language, eye rolling) physical context (place, arrangements, even shared weather) the power of our other senses (like smell and touch).

Some of my favorite work on the topic of miscommunications through digital written communication comes from Jocelyn K. Glei, author of Unsubscribe: How to Kill Email Anxiety, Avoid Distractions, and Get Real Work Done. Glei writes about the lack of the social feedback loop when communicating by email or text alone. Important here, as she points out, is research by Daniel Goleman on the “negativity bias, ” which says that readers of e-communication misgauge tone with a bias toward the negative; in other words, if someone writes an email with what they think is a positive tone, the reader is more likely to absorb that as neutral, and if someone writes a neutral email or text, the reader is likely to feel negative about it. This is even more pressing in e-communication, because of the lack of feedback in online communications. In a face-to-face conversation, we might proceed in a quick back-and-forth bolstered by countless subconscious cues, adapting our responses based on the reactions we see written on the other person’s face. But in email, as Glei writes “I, the sender, just blurt everything out at you, the receiver, and hope for the best” (17).

Liberal use of emoticons (ie, emojis today) and punctuation marks can help to convey the feelings behind what you write. For example, compare these four iterations of the same brief response: 

Bottom line: emojis help to convey the sort of nuances that go missing when we type and type and type to get our point across, and this is a powerful way to enhance our communication skills online. I’m not sure about how chatGPT chose to make emojis such a core element of their go-to output, but I’d like to think that it has something to do with the research by Goleman et al. And while I worry that the early result might be disdain for emojis (as they signal that someone has used chatGPT), I’d like to encourage us all to keep them in there from now on. In (probably a very short) time, we will assimilate ourselves to their prevalence, and this could be an important way to compensate for the pitfalls of living in a world dominated by asynchronous e-communication.