Emoji Humanization

Conveying meaning in instant messaging requires an ability to communicate succinctly at speed. Hastily written text messages often lack the nuances expressed in gestural movement, tone of voice and body language. and in instant messaging sarcasm is the most misunderstood semantic convention. The spectrum of humanizing emotions are not easily interpreted without tonality and expression.

Whether this dilemma is helped by the introduction of :) or :( is highly contested. Some linguists have considered Emoji to be an important linguistic development. The possibility of a truly universal pictorial language spanning the globe is an exciting idea, and plausible if you think pictures of faces and dogs or lipstick look the same no matter what verbal

The mere desire to imitate a face humanizes, and users respond to them in similar ways to face to face contact. This is the ‘affective’ quality of emoji. Michael Betancourt has suggested that affective labor is a symptom of the disassociation between the reality of the capitalist economy and the alienation it produces, and is maintained by an agnotological order, meaning the normalisation of ignorance. He has suggested that affective labor may have a role in the development and maintenance of what he has termed “agnotologic capitalism.” The affective labor created to address this alienation is part of the mechanisms where the agnotological order maintains its grip on the social: managing the emotional states of the consumers, who also serve as the labor reserve, is a necessary precondition for the effective management of the quality and range of information. By allowing greater expression in our user interface, through emoji, our desire to communicate is fulfilled while also allowing a greater, more illuminating catagorisation of emotional expression

In other words, although affective labor has never been entirely outside of capitalist production, the processes of economic postmodernization that have been in course for the past 25 years have positioned affective labor in a role that is not only directly productive of capital but at the very pinnacle of the hierarchy of laboring forms. Affective labor is one face of what I will call "immaterial labor", which has assumed a dominant position with respect to the other forms of labor in the global capitalist economy. Saying that capital has incorporated and exalted affective labor and that affective labor is one of the highest value-producing forms of labor from the point of view of capital does not mean that, thus contaminated, it is no longer of use to anticapitalist