It is widely considered that the most iconic face to launch a famous perfume was Marilyn Monroe for Chanel No 5 when in 1952 she said that she wore "a few drops of Chanel No 5 and nothing else to bed”.
It has echoes of another beautiful lady, Helen of Troy, who in Christopher Marlowe’s play Doctor Faustus was famously described as "The face that launched a thousand ships", when her alleged elopement triggered the Trojan War with a massive fleet setting sail for Troy.
In more recent times, in 1999 to be exact, another face launched not a thousand ships but now close to four thousand other faces when a Japanese software developer, Shigetaka Kurita, created the first emoji with the aim of helping people to communicate their emotions and other information more easily and quickly on mobile internet sites, having seen how popular a heart symbol had been for teenagers.
The concept perhaps epitomises the famous adage that "a picture is worth a thousand words" where our brains seem to process visual information and emotions significantly faster and more succinctly than words.
Children learn first from pictures – are we going back to be children? Are we going back to the idea of communicating by cave paintings?
Cartoons have the power to capture strong lessons and emotions, while caricatures also send a message, yet neither are the real thing.
They are really a new form of shorthand with new emojis being invented or discovered each year.
With so many, we really need a degree in emoji to understand all the different emojis with all their slightly different nuances.
- Emoji intelligence
Keep Reading
Many will argue there are great benefits in using emojis, with the obvious one being that things can be said more quickly by using them (is the time saved by using them better spent, though?
But is that not saying we do not have time for the other person?) and that they prevent misunderstanding (though that is debatable – with numerous different smiles available do we know that the meaning we intend is the meaning taken?
While we are on the subject, do we “read” an emoji or see it?). People will argue that emojis “boost audience engagement”; they “enhance the emotional state of the receiver”; they “convey emotions quickly and creatively when words alone cannot”.
However, it could equally be argued that emojis trivialise the very emotions that they are meant to represent.
An angry face is meant to tell us the person is very angry yet anger is a deep-lying emotion; if we want to show how very angry we are we simply add more angry faces (similar to how people often use numerous exclamation marks to try to underline how funny something is).
Emojis can be open to misunderstanding while they are not realistic – do we see people rolling on the ground with laughter with tears streaming down their face as often as the emoji suggests?
It is said that ninety-two percent of communication online is done by emoji – really? (What emoji would we use there to convey our genuine surprise or disbelief?)
Yet it is interesting (please show an emoji for that), or perhaps concerning (another emoji please), that in the period since emojis have been introduced, emotional intelligence has been seen to be far more important and necessary than academic intelligence with mental wellness becoming the biggest issue.
We need to enable our children to understand and communicate, to control and convey their emotions with words, not just with their face or with emojis.
Someone’s well-being is not defined by one simple cartoon character.
Will we be using emojis in exam answers, in Statutory Instruments, in news reports?
Should it be included in the curriculum, if it is so widely used and needs to be fully understood?
Is it the best way to communicate our emotions? Using emojis is not a matter of time being saved; it might rather be more a matter of laziness, similar to prescriptive text and AI, in many cases.
Our children are real (not artificial), emotional beings. Who they are deep down is what we must help our children to understand.
The time saved by not using words could be best be used to get to know and understand other people better.
The lack of mental wellness may crucially be caused by not interacting more personally with others. So, are emoji faces launching the right ships, like relationship, citizenship, scholarship, workmanship and, dare we add, penmanship?
Or are they leading to a greater war? It is not emoji intelligence that matters but emotional intelligence – for goodness sake, let us picture that.
