Remember the times when people meant what they said? Me neither. I do remember the times when no one unnecessarily went overboard with emotions and emoticons, particularly the heart symbol. And I hold smartphone apps for sucking the meaning out of what I thought was a special emoji.
Apps have changed how we communicate. It’s no longer enough to just be nice and cordial. There are new norms to be followed. You almost feel like you are on the clock, thanks to read receipts and the last seen feature.
And don’t even get me started on the overuse of the heart emoji and the role of app makers in fostering this behaviour.
I think we can all pinpoint the exact time when we decided to stop using a singular red heart emoji on WhatsApp. It was when the app somehow decided that it was appropriate to enlarge the emoticon and for extra dramatics, it added a beating animation. It was so cringe that even my best friend started sending me brown hearts. WhatsApp somehow caught on and added the same effects to most other heart emojis as well.
WhatsApp, please, it’s not that serious. | Image Credit – PhoneArena
What’s even more annoying than a large, beating heart sent by someone you love is a heart react or emoji from someone who barely knows you. What happened to boundaries and genuine emotions? I have had people I purely have a commercial relationship with send me hearts. If I have known you for only a week and chances are that we won’t keep in touch unless our circumstances compel us to, such as working at the same place, please don’t bombard me with hearts on my phone. It feels false, fake, and overly sweet.
That’s not to say that people who send you heart emojis are not authentic. Similarly, I don’t think that the heart emoji necessarily has connotations of romance in this day and age. However, the heart emoji still very much equates to love, and for that reason, I think it’s something of a sacred emoji and must be reserved for friends and family.
I think many of us were conditioned by the likes of WhatsApp and Instagram to punctuate every feel-good conversation with a heart. And now, Google Messages wants us to indulge in overuse of the heart emoji. That might come across as something benign but it’s a visual representation of how misplaced our emotions are and why tech may be to blame for it.
Double-tapping a message on Google Messages will stamp it with a heart. | Image Credit – 9to5Google
The latest version of the app will heart messages when you double-tap on them. And given our propensity to go for defaults, many of us are likely to react to messages with a heart instead of long-pressing on a text and choosing something else.
Facebook chose the middle ground by keeping thumbs-up as the default emoji but only Reddit keeps it real with upvotes and downvotes. I say hurt me with thetruth downvotes but never comfort me with a lie heart emoji.
Symbols and signs have meanings and some people read more into them than others. There are whole articles about decoding the different heart emojis for crying out loud.
For a society with serious trust issues, we sure use the heart emoji far more than we ought to. What happened to the good old thumbs-up? If it’s being phased out for coming across as unsettling or passive-aggressive, who thought it was a good idea to replace it with the heart emoji?