The Murky Ethics of Emoji: Comparative Responses to the Diversity Question

The unassuming emoji was elevated to cultural icon in 2016 when New York’s Museum of Modern Art purchased the original designs for its permanent collection.1 The Museum praised those “humble masterpieces of design” as the seeds of a new visual language.2 Growing academic interest in emoji as non-verbal punctuation in social media speech is generally supportive of such accolades. Interest is particularly keen in the disciplines of linguistics, semiotics, neurology, human cognition, anthropology, machine learning, human-computer interaction, artificial intelligence, and law.3 Somewhat puzzling, however, are the contradictory functions being assigned to those cartoonish icons: they can inject clarity, but might also introduce deliberate ambiguity into our casual communications.