TECHTONICS

THE EMOJI AND THE MEME: NOTES TOWARD AN ILLUSTRATED GRAMMAR OF FEELINGS

IRIS VAGA

October 24, 2025

In the beginning was the word—then came the yellow face. Here we explore how our emotions have migrated from sentences to symbols, from syntax to pixels. What began as shorthand for warmth has become a full-fledged language of irony, intimacy, and exhaustion—a world where sincerity wears a smiley and despair arrives as a meme. Between the bureaucrat emoji and the trickster meme, this essay finds not the death of language but its newest disguise: feeling, outsourced to the image, still trying to be understood.

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It begins, as all twenty-first-century stories seem to, with a small picture. A yellow face, circular, unthreatening, its expression wavering between joy and apology. It sits at the edge of our messages, patient and suggestive. You press it almost without thinking, and it becomes part of your voice.

At first, it seems harmless—decorative, even efficient. But the longer one looks, the stranger it becomes. The emoji promises emotion, yet replaces it. What began as a supplement to language has quietly become its rival—a shorthand for entire registers of feeling that we no longer trust words to bear.

The premise was innocence itself: to make digital communication more human. Text was too dry, too easily misunderstood. Tone vanished in transmission, and irony risked going undetected. The emoji, a small burst of image, would restore the warmth of gesture to the chill of text. But what followed was not warmth but a new grammar of affect—one in which sincerity and simulation became indistinguishable.

When a friend ends a message with a small face, you know how the sentence should be read. But you also know that this shading has been outsourced to a symbol, and thus that feeling no longer emerges from the sentence itself. It is appended, like a seal of authenticity—except, of course, it isn’t authentic at all.

The original smiley: the man who taught the internet how to feel without words

The history is well known. In 1999, Shigetaka Kurita, a designer for a Japanese telecom company, created a set of 176 pictograms for early mobile phones. Each was twelve by twelve pixels, elemental enough to travel smoothly through primitive data networks. Their purpose was practical: to compress meaning, save bandwidth, and convey tone with minimal characters. But efficiency, in language as in economics, carries moral risk. Once feeling can be expressed in smaller units, feeling itself begins to shrink to fit the available space.

What Kurita could not have foreseen was how quickly those icons would become the dominant vernacular of global communication. Within two decades, the emoji was no longer a supplement to language; it was language. A teenager in Cairo, a retiree in Lisbon, and a venture capitalist in Palo Alto could all send the same image and be understood. The dream of universal communication—the old utopian project of the Enlightenment—had arrived, stripped of its philosophical pretensions and sponsored by telecommunications firms.

Before the emoji, there was this: emotion rendered in stone, syntax without sound

To understand this shift, recall that writing itself began as picture. Hieroglyphs, cuneiform, cave paintings—all were attempts to anchor experience in visible form. The emoji closes a long historical loop. We are back among pictographs, only now our temples are glass and our gods are invisible algorithms.

The moralists of language worry that this return to image marks a decline—a retreat from complexity. They are partly right. The emoji simplifies. It smooths the grain of emotion, rendering all feeling legible, exchangeable, shareable. It performs empathy without requiring it. But simplicity has its own eloquence. It lets us say what speech cannot bear, to touch across distance without presumption.

There is tenderness in the deliberate substitution of image for word. It acknowledges the failure of articulation. It says, more or less: I do not know how to express this, but I wish to be understood. The risk, however, is that once this shorthand becomes habitual, it erodes the desire to articulate at all. The gesture replaces the struggle. The feeling becomes iconographic.

Running parallel to this evolution is another, more feral species of digital expression: the meme. Where emojis are sanctioned, standardized, and bureaucratically approved, memes are anarchic, mutating, ownerless. They emerge, multiply, die, and resurrect at a speed that mocks authority. If the emoji is the bureaucrat of digital feeling, the meme is its trickster.

The term predates the internet. In The Selfish Gene (1976), Richard Dawkins coined it to describe a unit of cultural transmission—an idea, behavior, or tune that spreads through imitation, much as genes propagate through reproduction. Borrowing from the Greek mimeme (that which is imitated), he shortened it to “meme” to rhyme (sort of) with “gene.” His metaphor was biological but proved prophetic. Four decades later, the meme became literal in the endlessly replicating images of the digital age.

The meme about memes: self-reference wearing a velvet jacket

To scroll through a social feed is to witness cultural Darwinism in real time. The unfunny die quickly; the resonant endure. The successful meme achieves what every artist dreams of: instant recognizability combined with infinite variability. It is collective authorship in its purest form—anonymous, iterative, promiscuous.

The meme’s native climate is irony. It thrives on double meanings, reversals, and misfires. It depends on shared context—the unspoken understanding that the image means both more and less than it appears to. It can turn politics into farce, tragedy into entertainment, exhaustion into performance. And yet beneath the irony, a current of sincerity persists. Every meme, however absurd, carries a small pulse of human recognition: Yes, I too have felt this confusion, this boredom, this despair disguised as laughter.

Memes, then, are not merely jokes but mirrors. They reflect a culture’s emotional weather, distilling anxiety into portable form. During the early months of the pandemic, the internet became a museum of dark humor. Memes about isolation, sourdough, and existential fatigue spread faster than the virus itself. They did not trivialize the crisis so much as metabolize it. To laugh, even mordantly, was to survive.

But memes, like emojis, obey the law of overuse. Once a joke becomes too recognizable, its edges dull, its humor evaporates. The internet’s archive of dead memes is a graveyard of exhausted ironies. What remains is not laughter but cultural tinnitus—the background hum of perpetual reference.

Every civilization gets the gods it can retweet

This exhaustion is not accidental. It is the result of a system where attention is currency. The meme’s power to travel makes it ideal for commerce and ideology alike. Advertisers and politicians have learned to weaponize its familiarity. A joke becomes a slogan, a slogan becomes a movement, and the movement dissolves back into content.

It is tempting to moralize—to claim that memes cheapen discourse, that they reduce complexity to reaction. But that complaint is too easy, too nostalgic. What memes reveal is our collective hunger for speed, for compression, for a language that keeps pace with experience. It’s not that we can’t think deeply; it’s that the world no longer pauses long enough for depth to gather. The meme speaks in the tempo of today’s attention span.

Still, something human persists within this acceleration. The right image, at the right moment, can convey solidarity more effectively than a thousand essays. When a community seizes on a meme to express grief, rage, or exhaustion, it transforms irony into communion. The laughter that follows is rarely cruel; it is protective, even affectionate. Humor becomes a shelter against incoherence.

The emoji and the meme thus form two poles of our digital affect: the sanctioned and the spontaneous, the administrative and the viral. One flattens emotion into legibility, the other multiplies it into chaos. Together they constitute a new language—a language not of ideas, but of recognition. Their grammar concerns not what a sign means, but who understands it.

Traditional language aims for universality. Words describe things, and meaning can, in theory, be shared. Emoji-meme language operates on intimacy. It presumes shared references and tone. To send a particular image is to say not merely “this is funny” but “you and I know why this is funny.” Meaning collapses into relationship.

From divine comedy to digital shorthand: laughter perfected by repetition

This intimacy deepens some bonds while excluding others. It turns language into social currency. The ability to navigate shifting codes of digital humor becomes a measure of belonging. To misunderstand a meme is to expose one’s distance from the tribe. The emoji that once promised universality now delineates microcultures. The meme that sought freedom now enforces hierarchies of cool.

And yet there is tenderness even in this fragmentation. When someone sends you an image that captures what you feel but cannot articulate, there is a flicker of connection, brief but unmistakable. The loneliness of the individual feed becomes, for a moment, communal. The image stands in for empathy. It says, wordlessly: I see you.

There are nights when the whole economy of this new language seems both ridiculous and profound. Ridiculous because it reduces the enormity of human experience to pixels, and profound because, despite everything, it works. People reach one another through these signs. They laugh, console, flirt, mourn. They find a way.

It’s tempting to imagine this as a passing phase—that language will recover its former depth once we tire of our toys. But perhaps what we’re seeing is not decline but adaptation. Every communication technology alters what it means to feel. The telegraph condensed distance; the telephone condensed silence; the internet condenses the self. The emoji and the meme are what remain when emotion is translated into code.

Dad humor: the last refuge of sincerity in meme form

There is, too, a quieter argument: that these small symbols are not failures of expression but acknowledgments of its limits. The history of art is, in part, the history of people admitting that words are not enough. The emoji and the meme are our latest admissions. They expose the gap between experience and articulation, between what we live and what we can say. In keeping that gap visible, they keep it alive.

Still, we might ask what we lose when so much of our emotional traffic passes through images. The loss is subtle but real: We lose friction. Words demand precision, and require the slow work of choosing. Images glide past that effort. They offer the illusion of immediacy without the discipline of thought. Over time, this ease shapes not only how we communicate but how we feel. The emotions that travel fastest are the ones we learn to have.

Perhaps this is why our age oscillates between numbness and oversharing. We are fluent in reaction but illiterate in reflection. The emoji and the meme invite us to express instantly, and we obey. But expression is not understanding. The danger is not that these forms destroy meaning, but that they persuade us we no longer need it.

And yet I find it difficult to condemn them. There is something unmistakably human about the attempt to make meaning out of noise. To look at a glowing screen and send a symbol into the void—this is not so different from painting on a cave wall. Both acts say: I am here; I felt this; someone may understand.

In that light, the emoji and the meme are not degradations but continuations. They are the vernacular art forms of our moment—low, mutable, collaborative. Their aesthetics are speed and surprise, and their ethics are recognition. They do not aspire to permanence, only to contact.

Automation begins in small talk: the self outsourced to a card

One might wish for a slower world, where words could again bear the full weight of emotion. But we live in this one, where feelings arrive as notifications and grief refreshes hourly. To communicate here requires agility. The emoji and the meme are agile. They move at the pace of the pulse.

And still, behind their velocity, a quieter longing persists: for language that means more than circulation, for a symbol that doesn’t exhaust itself in recognition. Occasionally, it happens—a single image, sent at the right time, pierces through the haze of irony and lands somewhere near truth. The effect is disproportionate to the medium. It feels like a small miracle: the return of meaning through the backdoor of banality.

This, finally, is the secret power of our illustrated grammar of feeling. Beneath the jokes and gestures lies a stubborn faith in communication itself—the belief that, however garbled, the signal will get through. That faith, more than any technology, keeps language alive. We can lament what has been lost—the patience of prose, the subtlety of tone—or attend to what has been gained, namely a new immediacy of exchange, a democratization of expression, a reminder that the human urge to signify cannot be domesticated for long. The emoji and the meme are not the end of language; they are its latest disguise.

And perhaps, when the servers have rusted and the screens have gone dark, someone will find these fragments—an image, a caption, a digital sigh—and see in them what we meant all along: not irony, not detachment, but the stubborn persistence of feeling in a world too fast to name.

Iris Vaga (b. 1995 in Perth, Australia) is a semiotician specializing in digital linguistics and the anthropology of the image. She teaches a course called Post-Verbal Communication: From Hieroglyphs to Hashtags at the University of Sydney and once gave a conference paper entirely in emojis “for methodological consistency.” Her current research concerns “the emotional metabolism of the meme,” though she insists that the real work happens in the comments section.

Cover image: The face that wonders what it means to mean