Why so much emoji nonsense?

[James Kass via Unicode]

Ken Whistler replied to Erik Pedersen,

> Emoticons were invented, in large part, to fill another
> major hole in written communication -- the need to convey
> emotional state and affective attitudes towards the text.

There is no such need.  If one can't string words together which
'speak for themselves', there are other media.  I suspect that
emoticons were invented for much the same reason that "typewriter art"
was invented:  because it's there, it's cute, it's clever, and it's
novel.

> This is the kind of information that face-to-face
> communication has a huge and evolutionarily deep
> bandwidth for, but which written communication
> typically fails miserably at.

Does Braille include emoji?  Are there tonal emoticons available for
telephone or voice transmission?  Does the telephone "fail miserably"
at oral communication because there's no video to transmit facial tics
and hand gestures?  Did Pontius Pilate have a cousin named Otto?
These are rhetorical questions.

For me, the emoji are a symptom of our moving into a post-literate
age.  We already have people in positions of power who pride
themselves on their marginal literacy and boast about the fact that
they don't read much.  Sad!