Still using emoji? Your smiley face is showing your age
Adrian Weckler
Older people are the only ones now who use the symbols in any great
numbers. And the older you are, the more of them you use.
It’s true: older people are the only ones now who use emoji in any great
numbers. And the older you are, the more of them you use.
From my interaction with friends and family, I’ve noticed that for
every 10 years above the age of 45, emoji deployment goes up by at least
one per text or WhatsApp.
Fortysomethings might stick to a simple thumbs-up, heart or ‘crying
laughing’.
Fiftysomethings are prone to throwing in some additional ‘dancing’ or
‘boogie’ symbols.
And sixtysomethings? You just slap in a random string of emoji with
whatever animals, weather symbols and laughing faces you can find on
your phones. You appear to earn bonus cred among your fellow
silver-haired cellular buds if you ‘rollercoaster’ it — intersperse a
separate emoji every few words in a text or WhatsApp.
Or you think you do.
The reality is that younger people groan, or smile patiently, when they
see texts from older family members laced with yellow emoticons. As our
house’s resident youth culture consultant (20) explained it to me, it’s
like your dad turning up at your college disco in a hoodie. You know
he’s trying to be ‘with it’, but it’s a silent cringe-fest. It also
guarantees that everyone your own age stops wearing hoodies.
This isn’t to say that emoji have been completely set aside by younger
people. They just don’t use them the way you do.
A recent illustration of how an emoji can suddenly become untrendy among
younger generations was the ‘laughing crying’ symbol.
About three or four years ago, older people started using it en masse.
That caused an exodus among Gen Z texters.
“It’s common wisdom on TikTok that the laughing crying emoji is for
boomers,” Jeremy Burge, an emoji historian, founder of Emojipedia and
creator of World Emoji Day, told me some time back.
For those who don’t know Emojipedia, it’s the main authority on emoji,
to the point where it is sometimes referred to in defamation cases when
seeking to clarify the definition of certain symbols.
(Emoji can be a deadly serious business; last month, a Canadian farmer
called Chris Achter was fined C$82,000 (about €55,000) for using a
‘thumbs up’ emoji in response to a contract sent to him by text message
— he didn’t think it amounted to a formal agreement; a judge thought
otherwise.)
The underlying point in all of this is one of identity and generational
distinction. It comes in two diametrically opposed directions.
Older people don’t want to feel that they’re ‘past it’. Some show this
partially by enthusiastically jumping on what they perceive to be a
modern, fun trend: emoji. Laughing! Sunshine! Puppy! Hand-clapping!
But the minute this becomes the motif of your aunt Margaret, you start
to wince and back away. You love your aunt Margaret, the way you love
your great-aunt Teresa and all of your uncles — Noel, Dennis, Terry and
Maurice. You’re on friendly terms, too, with all of their morning bridge
clubs and walking groups — Maureen, Philomena, Bríd, Con, Dympna,
Bernard and Colette.
But you don’t, in all gentleness, want to be them.
You don’t listen to Declan Nerney or Chris Rea. You don’t watch
Countryfile or Top Gear. You don’t wear Skechers. And you wouldn’t be
caught dead with a Rolex, even in the unlikely case that you entered —
and won — the parish lotto.
For all of these reasons, you now — if you’re under 45 — don’t use emoji
much any more.
Read more
What do your most-used emojis say about you?
Do you still use the thumbs-up, clapping hands or red heart emoji? Then
bad news, you’re officially uncool
Irish Independent
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