Jonathan E. Abel, "The New Real: Media and Mimesis in Japan from Stereographs to Emoji" (U of Minnesota Press, 2023)
New Books in East Asian Studies
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The Importance of Emoji in Communication
The way we use emoji is not only cultural it's idiocy highly idiosyncratic. People around the world have misapprehended it as things like soft serve ice cream, because sometimes it shows up as being pink in color yellow even depending on what phone interface you're using. It's not a kind of universal humanism a kind of free and frictionless way of communicating, but it serves to remind us of something else. And I say the reason why this emoji is so popular might not have anything to do with the fact that we are all humans,. But rather that there's a very human kind of usage of emoji themselves in which we're communicating sitting on our toilets.
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