(Girls and boys plus phones and texting leads to relationships minus all emotions)

These days students are constantly tweeting, texting, Facebook messaging, Instagramming and Snapchatting each other. But what would happen if the beloved faces that are programmed into our phones to imitate our emotions were gone?

Emojis (Emoji is Japanese for emoticons) are a feature of an app that serves as a portal to an easier form of showing emotion through technology. This app has been sweeping the globe since 2012 and is a large contributor to the extensive amount of flirting caused by adding a small yellow face to your average text message.

Before emojis (back in the Stone Age) the only form of emotion in text messages was your simple colon and parentheses; if you were lucky you even got a semi-colon and a parentheses.

Emojis have been received so well that smartphone users comment on how difficult it is to text someone who does not have the privilege of owning tiny pictures to make texting more “fun.”

While many young people love using emojis and spending countless hours on their phones, emojis eliminate the sharing of real emotions and completely demolish mature relationships. What is even scarier is that it’s not only affecting individuals but our society as a whole.

The human face has 53 muscles, enabling us to create many facial expressions. This in mind, a few combinations of punctuation could not accurately represent our unique reaction to someone’s comment. Do we want to raise children who can only present an idea via emojis? What happens when these teenagers need to converse with other adults for their job and have no social skills unless they can put their thumbs to work?

Children await the day they have a phone so they can text people and use emojis to hold conversations, and then they learn that texting is all there is. Our generation seems allergic to phone calls or actually meeting with someone and patronizes “old people” who actually talk to each other in person.

Teenage relationships single-handedly revolve around phones, computers, and ipods. This issue is incredibly similar to the movie “Her” which was released this year and described a man who had a “perfect” relationship with his computer operating system. Problem is that the computer operating system is not a person; these systems are programmed by manufacturers; a personality that is taught to respond to your feelings.

While emojis may seem like a blessing to technology savvy teenagers, the problem arises when texting turns into the main form of communication. In turn we have eliminated face-to-face conversations; or even talking on the phone. Both of which involve inflections in voice and emotions that are difficult to reenact over text messages.

Emojis are not entirely at fault for this sudden change in conversations, but it also contributes to the increase in time spent on phones, ipods, etc. As if that area of our lives needed more attention anyway.

Any girl on this planet will tell you how much they despise teenage boys who break up with their girlfriends over text message. But what is even more ironic is that the heartbroken girlfriends go to social media and use EMOJIS to rant and rave about their terrible boyfriends. It’s an unending cycle that revolves around technology, and emojis only fuel the desire to plaster personal lives all over Twitter and Facebook which in turn causes more problems.

This immature problem would be eliminated if texting was not our main form of communication. Face-to-face interaction is an endangered species at this point and emojis are only contributing to the cause. What will communication be like for the next generations? Will people be entirely limited to texting and sharing their feelings using emojis?

With an incredible education system in America one would think that our thoughtful, inquisitive teenagers would open their eyes to the problem among them. It is not the people who are awful it is our lifestyle, and the only way to fix that is to eliminate our “need” for endless amounts of technology.

As a generation with this much power to determine the future, we should be reinventing our culture and taking it back to the “olden days” when communication did not involve animatronic pictures and text messages. Our lives should not be wasted picking out an emoji to represent your feelings instead of face to face conversations that are overflowing with emotions.

Bekah Hayes
Reporter