EMOJI POLITICS
Emojis. If you’ve picked up a digital device in the last 10 years, you can’t really have missed them. Young and old, most of us have used them at some point in a text message, tweet or Instagram post. Their popularity is huge: on any given day, around 60 million emojis are used on Facebook, and more than five billion on Messenger, and at the time of writing, 22.5 billion emojis had been sent today on Twitter alone, according to emojitracker.com and the maths of my brother Mark who kindly explained to me how many zeros a billion has.
The crying laughing face is the most popular universally, followed by the red love heart. But what do these cute little cartoons really say about us? How representative are they of our complex, beautiful and often messy identities? And are they as innocent as they seem, or is there something more sinister lurking in our pockets?