Overanalyzing Emojis

An Entirely Unnecessary Deep Dive Into the Digital Abyss

As of Sep 2024, there are 3790 emojis, which is slightly excessive by any measure of artistic output.

However, despite their rampant proliferation, these diminutive digital artworks deserve far more examination and consideration than we generally offer them.

So, of those 3790 glorious little pixelated pictures, here’s a closer look at just five of them.

What does the empty airplane seat say about the loneliness of travel? Here we sit together in the pressurised cabin, flying across cultures, centuries of accumulative existence between us, yet staring ahead, steadfastly refusing to experience our shared loneliness together. The single airplane seat is our cage, simultaneously a prison of our loneliness, while also acting as our protector, shielding us from the experience of fellow prisoners suffering the very same enduring fate.

The now ubiquitous smiley face, once simply a colon and single parentheses, could its simplistic and primordial form have had any idea of the rampant digital proliferation it would soon endure? As we stare into its agonisingly stretched, hollow, and void-like eyes, what horrors we wonder are being obscured behind this benign, smiling facade? Not even the advanced ancestors of this symbolic digital visage will ever know, for it is a mystery now, even unto itself.

At first appraisal, a simple aubergine, famed for its ability to substitute meat in vegetarian cooking; it has now come to provide a similar substitution in the extensive, yet crucially limited emoji vocabulary of sex. What does this duality of symbolism mean? And how does this dichotomy manifest? Especially if we are to consider the humble aubergine farmer, trying and failing to write an emoji text to his date. We must wish him well.

This practical piece of human anatomy may have retained a reputation for keeping the brain intact and holding together its owner’s face, if it weren’t for the fact the face has an uncanny ability to disintegrate soon after death. As such, once cruelly exposed, this wonderfully useful construction of bone now represents the very thing it protected us from for so long. What a cruel injustice indeed. But, all is not lost, for our humble skull is now finding new life in its digital form, as recognition of hilarity so powerful as to be life-ending, and therefore finally being granted the levity and joy it has always deserved.

The boarded-up abandoned house, at first glance simply a victim of neglect, but in truth a visual indicator of a much larger decay. What intolerable economic situation forced the last occupants of this home to leave? What potential fate necessitated its doors and windows to be so vigorously and haphazardly boarded up? Yes, this decrepit building is much more than just an abandoned home, it’s a symbol of systematic failure, of an erased community, of a brutally unrealised dream. All that we can be sure of is that it will find no solace once it’s inevitably and enthusiastically converted into a high-end boutique coffee shop next year.

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