emoji by WOMANZINE

any other way. Other people have told me they use it as a shriveled peen, an exclamation point, or a quirky filler—an expressive way to be present when there’s nothing else to say at all, a virtual patting of the seat next to you to let someone else know that you are there, you are present, available.

In this way, the appeal of the shrimp—and all emoji, quite honestly—lies in its ambiguity and its power to become a changeling in conversations. We use these tiny images to open a dialog or to end one, or we combine them to form sentences, complicated pictograms that decorate all our digital communications. And so, they remain universal, a communal lexicon that we have adopted to humanize our interactions, which now almost always seem to happen on a screen, in boxes, and chat windows. With little to go on except a small economy of hastily tapped-out words, emoji can warm up exchanges that otherwise might feel stifled and stiff, bloodless or confusing. How do you text a feeling of anger, frustration, or of love? Emoji, like all images, allow us to project our own emotions, reactions, and interactions, and perhaps make it even easier to receive and process them.

Emoji don’t necessary make communicating any clearer: I used to love employing the fist bump emoji to mean “power” and “strength to you, sister” until several people, including my sister, asked me why I wanted to punch them.

But even those mix-ups add a much-needed element of joy to the tedium of digital communication, which never has a clear end or beginning but just runs constantly like a lazy river or an extended, half-distracted chat over brunch.