Tag Archives: Facebook emojis

If you live in Spain or Ireland you’ll soon have the privilege of telling someone that their Facebook post makes you angry or sad or if you love it or laughed at it. Perfect! Just what we need; more ways to express our imaginary feelings with fewer words to our imaginary friends! Instead of actually using words you can now show your friends your feelings with “emojis” that accurately portray the whole range of complex human emotions. Apparently Yay and Wow are very important emotions and obviously too long as words for people to type.

First of all, why do Ireland and Spain get to be the test markets? I have nothing against those two wonderful countries, but why are they the test markets? Hey Zuckerberg, how about you use that big brain of yours to figure out a way for each country to have their own emojis appropriate for their own culture. That doesn’t sound too hard does it?

Secondly, there’s a whole range of other emojis that I’d love to see on FB. How about a WTF? emoji? I can imagine that one would get a lot of use. Or maybe the I had no idea you were a radical political nutjob emoji. That one would come in handy a lot. Or maybe the STOP SENDING ME GAME INVITES OR I’M UNFRIENDING YOU!!!  emoji. How about the Holy crap! Enough pictures of your dog/cat, don’t you have anything else in your life? emoji.

What I’d really like to see though is a feature where you can take selfies of you showing different feelings and then you can dial those up and put a little emoji of your own face with the appropriate emotion. That would seem far more personal than the plain smiley faces.

What really gets my goat (where’s the getting your goat emoji?) is that because Zuckerberg is a high I.Q., high end of the spectrum Asperger’s guy he’s created a website that forces the rest of the world to interact emotionally in the same limited way as him. Most people have heard the term Asperger’s. It is a disorder with a very wide range from autistic people with no ability to communicate at even the most basic level to high functioning, very intelligent people who have difficulty interpreting the emotional cues of others such as tone of voice, posture and facial expression.

To be honest, I have no idea if Zuckerberg is Asperger’s in any way, but he did develop Facebook so he could talk to girls in college. Now he’s trying to boil all our emotions down into five simple smiley faces. But for someone with Asperger’s, that might be perfect because that’s how they interpret emotions, broadly without a lot of nuance.

When I started writing this today I had no intent of getting preachy or educating anyone on Asperger’s syndrome. My intent was to point out that social media of all types may connect us with more people, which is great, but if we lean on social media as a relationship surrogate we are crippling ourselves emotionally as a society. I can imagine a future in which people have lost the ability to have genuine emotions because of a lack of real, face to face interaction and we’ll just marry the people who gave us the most “likes” or heart emojis.

So who wants to hit the WTF? emoji now? And what Facebook emojis would you like to see?

If you enjoy #ThePhilFactor please share it on Facebook or Twitter (ironic, right?) by hitting the share buttons below. Have a great Saturday and get out there and emoji the hell out of someone you love! ~Phil