Emojis convey messages

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Emojis convey messages

Oct 09, 2017

Philippe Marco, Pepperdine student

Paul Cohen was a 19-year-old store worker, decided to wear a jacket that had the words "Fuck the Draft. Stop the War", which was in reference to the Vietnam War. At this time this was a very powerful way to express his emotions of the war and this is why he was brought up with the charges of " disturbing the peace and quiet of ay neighborhood or persons by offensive conduct".

Now in today's society, we are expressing our emotions and ideas in so many different ways. One of these ways is the use of emojis. Emojis are constantly being used to express how we feel with one another and the amount of emojis that there are is constantly increasing. We now even have apps on our phones that allows us to create emojis.

Using emojis now emphasizes the emotions behind messages because there is a lot of interpretation. When we use emojis we are really emphasizing how we feel about something.

As time has gone on with emojis we have also started to use them together to create messages. This is where problems can arise.

As more emojis are used in messages we need to be careful with how to interpret them. I personally believe that the expression of emotions is what we use emojis for. When we tell someone how we feel and we send a smiley face or a kissy face we are letting the receiver now that we are in a good mood but there is an issue. Since there is no tone behind these pictures we don't know how to completely understand it. This was one of the reasons why Apple changed one of its emojis, the gun emoji, to a squirt gun emoji. This happened because ofthe fact that the regular gun sends a more serious message and using it allows people to understand what the message is a tone that is all across the spectrum from boring to legitimately wanting to kill someone or something. We must be careful using emojis today because the expression that these emojis send can be interpreted in many different ways causing miscommunication between messengers.

To conclude, it is related because the messages that are given through emojis can be interpreted in different ways so you need to be careful with what you post because it can be interpreted completely wrong, the message can lead to problems within communicators.


Philippe Marco,a student in Jon Pfeiffer's Fall 2017 Media Law class at Pepperdine University, wrote the above essay in response to the prompt:In Cohen v. California, the Court protected two elements of speech: the emotive (the expression of emotion) and the cognitive (the expression of ideas). How do emojis come into play? Are they expressions of emotions? Of ideas? Some hybrid or would it be fallacious to even draw the connection?

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