Emoji have become an incredibly popular way to add more color to our written communications but is there any way you could survive using them exclusively on your favorite messaging app? WNYC this week posted an interview with its own NewTechCity senior producer Alex Goldmark, who took up a challenge this summer to communicate with his girlfriend on their smartphones using only the emoji available on the WeChat messaging app for a full month. Although the couple found it challenging to communicate complicated ideas and requests to one another, they found that using emoji worked perfectly well from expressing their feelings.
The couple started off picking emoji that they felt accurately represented themselves so they could have a proper emoji for the pronoun “I.” With their emoji avatars established, they then tried to establish a basic syntax — for instance, if Alex sent girlfriend Liza a message that first displayed his personal emoji and then displayed an emoji of a bus, that was a signal that he was getting on a bus to come home from work.
Communicating through emoji also inspired Alex to send more of what he described as “cheesy, affectionate” messages to Liza, which makes sense because it’s more difficult to tell someone to go to hell using adorable animated cartoon characters.
The full segment is worth checking out and can be found below.
