***DNF, but impressions are shared in the review. Will mention book in month-in-review blog post.***

I chose this book because:

I can’t be the only one who has wondered whether our language will evolve back to this version of hieroglyphics we call emojis, right?? I find the study of emojis as a legitimate part of language fascinating.

Upon reading this book:

At the beginning of the book, Evans posed the idea that Emoji is a code, not a language, which is an interesting distinction that I’ve never thought of before. Another thing I found insightful was the brief mention of the process of emoji selection, which was interesting to me, because there have been a number of times I’ve complained about there not being a certain emoji for something that I wanted to use. I’ve never really thought about emojis as something multinational companies and software engineers control, but of course, that makes sense. The implications of that are interesting to consider, but I don’t think it’s drastic enough to compare banning emojis to George Orwell’s 1984. Like, emojis are powerful for sure, but… it just seems a little overdramatic? I feel like people have enough agency to not be that affected by emojis or the lack of them.

Another point that was mentioned was that Emoji is a global form of communication, and then the book gave evidence by showing data of Emoji usage over time. Basically, a lot of people use emojis, and it’s only increasing. Which isn’t news, so I’m not sure I’d read a whole thing proving the increasing usage of Emoji. There were other similar instances, such as the point of the ambiguity of Emoji and our use of context clues to discern meaning, and the fact that Emojis provide non-verbal cues, making this form of communication more close to real life, filling a void that verbal cues cannot. All of these are good points and true points, but not something that I would need to read about to know. Perhaps this was just laying the groundwork for more insightful observations later on in the book, but I didn’t get that far.

I found myself thinking that I already knew all these things and that I could have written this, but the point is that I didn’t, and even though some of the points were obvious, a lot of work went into gathering the data to prove these points without question, which is good form for research. And that is something that I don’t have the diligence to do for this topic, or at the very least, wouldn’t take the time to do. For that reason, I feel like this is a good book for academic purposes, but it’s not something I would read for leisure, which is what I often read for.

I thought this would be a light read and BOY! was I wrong. Evans created a very in-depth and accurate description of history of visual language. If you think emoji's are just happy faces and hearts, the Emoji Code will take you on a fascinating journey through a psychological tunnel you did not see coming.