EMOJI DRIFT
MARK BESSOUDO
We are visual creatures navigating a world saturated with signs. The clarity, coherence and readability of urban space — its “legibility” — led to the idea of wayfinding systems: symbols that guide people through spatial environments by translating space into a readable language of maps, signs, and visual cues. From arrows on road signs to pictograms in airports to the icons on subway platforms, these standardized systems of symbols form mental maps: intuitive, collective understandings of space that transcend language. These standardized visual cues aren’t just functional; they are the scaffolding that shape our spatial experience, condensing complex information into shared recognition and understanding.
These symbols also have their counterparts in the digital world: emojis.
The emojis we casually append to texts, comments and captions are tiny wayfinding symbols for navigating the emotional topography of online life; they are tools for offering clarity in an otherwise ambiguous terrain of text. They also offer something rare: a globally shared visual lexicon. As a finite set of pictographs, recognizable across cultures, platforms, and devices, emojis serve as a sort of digital Esperanto. In 2015, Oxford Dictionaries even named 😂 ("Face with Tears of Joy") as its Word of the Year—a linguistic milestone, where image supplanted word as the dominant carrier of meaning.
Emojis, though standardized, have always been open to evolution and fracture. The thumbs-up emoji (👍), once a benign sign of approval, is now often read by Gen Z aspassive-aggressive. Our crying-laughing friend (😂), once the hero of 2015, is becoming replaced by the skull emoji (💀) in some circles. Freud is reported to have said that “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar”, but he obviously never received a 🍑 in a text message. Sometimes a peach isn’t just a peach.
But now, with the advent of AI-generated emojis — Genmojis — we could witness the collapse of this semiotic order. Genmojis allow users to create customized symbols for any imagined scenario: a lizard in a hat on a bicycle, a disappointed sunset, a melancholy waffle. These images are charming, novel, and expressive—but what they gain in specificity, they sacrifice in communicability outside their original context. Where emojis give us a visual commons, Genmojis threaten a semiotic free-for-all.
Of course, the success of Genmojis depends on their adoption. For all their potential, they face significant hurdles: technical limitations, questions of copyright, and the ever-present risk of digital decline through the process of enshittification (the Australian Macquarie Dictionary’s Word of the Year in 2024).
But perhaps the greatest challenge Genmojis face is the very thing that makes them so appealing: their specificity. Emojis work because they are universal, their meanings malleable enough to accommodate a wide range of contexts. Genmojis, by contrast, are inherently exclusionary, their meanings intelligible only to those who know the context in which they were created. And while there’s a certain charm to this digital inside joke, it also risks undermining the communal spirit that made emojis so beloved in the first place.
Critics might dismiss this as trivial. Aren’t emojis just fun add-ons? But that’s the point. They're add-ons we use every day to build meaning. Their everyday presence makes them powerful. Emojis became euphemisms, punchlines, mood indicators.
This is not to say all innovation is bad. The freedom to generate new symbols can lead to creativity and discovery. Genmojis can reinvigorate visual expression. But with no standard, no shared grammar, no limit, we risk entering a space where expression is so personalized it's unintelligible to anyone else. Communication devolves into aestheticized noise.
We need limits. We need standardization. Too much freedom isn’t liberating; it can be isolating. In language, in cities, in systems of meaning, rules are the scaffolding of mutual understanding. Emojis, limited as they are, offer that scaffolding. Genmojis tear it down and offer infinite options instead.
We are a visual species, yes—but also a communal one. Without a common semiotic architecture, everyone is lost in translation.
So go ahead—generate your lizard-on-a-bicycle Genmoji. Just don’t be surprised when no one else knows what it means.
Mark Bessoudo is an interdisciplinary writer, engineer and researcher exploring the social, environmental and philosophical issues related to buildings and cities.