Vote now: How often do you use emojis and GIFs in your messages?

Yesterday, when I was communicating with one of my colleagues—a quite young new hire—I realized that we’re using a completely different set of messaging tools, so to speak. I needed time to decipher the strings of emoticons, which, at times, were all this colleague was sending my way.

Now, I’m not a boomer (technically, I fall into the millennial group), but emoticons were never my thing. Back in the day of the mIRC, we used all kinds of symbol combinations to transmit more or less the same emotions as modern smiley faces but somehow it was different.

It required a certain level of engagement, and knowledge of this “Morse code” of sorts, to be able to communicate properly in those mIRC channels back then. Maybe it’s the same with modern emoticons, I don’t know, but when it’s already a tiny graphics, and sometimes even animated for you, I found it distasteful.

That’s, of course, my personal opinion, and I don’t judge people who use emoticons all the time in their messages. But it got me thinking: how often do people really use these tiny faces to reinforce their communication?

Vote in our poll, and feel free to fill the comment section with emoticons to prove your point!