It's interesting to watch the evolution of written language in action. I expect in 20 years we will routinely see emojis in written English novels and news articles. In 50 years we'll see them in textbooks and scientific journal articles.
Yet another reason I'm glad for the inevitability of death.
I can't be the only one who thinks emoji are a terrible idea. Granted, I also don't think logographic characters are a good idea but at least they have thousands of years of use and agreed upon semantic meaning behind them.
If everything you care to talk about can be easily described using thousand-year-old ideas, then I can see why you are against emojis. But this isn't true for many things people want to talk about today.
Language is just an encoding for ideas, and emojis are a new compression algorithm. Using a single character, you can now convey certain thoughts and sentiments that you previously needed many more characters to reference or explain.
"So then just explain it!" some might respond. "Why can't people be bothered to spend even a little time to write down what they think?" It's an accessibility issue. People have limited time every day to get their ideas across, and they deserve ways of conveying their ideas concisely. There is precedent for this too -- this is why we have acronyms and new words. "lol" and "minivan" don't have thousands of years of agreed-upon semantic meaning behind them.
A final thought -- whether you think emojis are a terrible idea might not be relevant to whether they should exist. Letting people live their own lives to the fullest is much more important than making sure you, I, a future historian, or any other third party understands what they are saying. But you don't have to worry about not being to understand conversations. Given what you prefer, if someone wants to address you as a target audience, then they probably won't use emojis.
What an overreaction. You'll find the proliferation of emojis distributed appropriately according to the genre of writing (among good writing of the genre). For example, you'll still hardly see emoji in newswriting where they don't have much to add to the semantic content, but you already see it liberally used in places where stickers and drawings are already expected: e.g. in edited Instagram photos.
> In 50 years we'll see them in [..] scientific journal articles.
I highly doubt this. Common shortcurts (such as "it's" for "it is") and dialect is still absent from serious journals (unless it's the research target, of course) and I'm rather sure emojis will similarly be disregarded.
