Will emoticons eventually replace words?

As technology gains an even more prominent foothold in our lives every day, the use of emoticons has changed the way people around the world communicate their thoughts and emotions with each other. 

Emoticons, used mostly in instant and text messaging, has long supplemented people’s words. However, as their usage increases, it seems as though emoticons have started to convey more meaning than words themselves.

For example, emoticon usage on popular Korean messaging app KakaoTalk has reportedly increased by 30% every year.

KakaoTalk supports a multitude of emoticons, ranging from simple emotions drawn on many cute characters, to fully animated emoticons that show a full range of emotions, in addition to the native emoticons available on smartphone keyboards today.

Many users have revealed that they often actually feel more comfortable conveying difficult emotions and thoughts through emoticons than trying to express them through words.

In addition, many feel that emoticons make it easier to cross cultural and language barriers as they try to communicate with friends and others from different cultures.

[+ 3099, – 91] KaTalk emoticons are so cute

[+ 2255, – 105] We’re the pioneers in this field and we’re neglecting the gold mine. The government needs to be aggressively removing all roadblocks otherwise we’re going to just help China like we did with the game industry

[+ 1540, – 75] Sometimes though if I send a block of text and they send back a character it makes them look lazy ㅋㅋ;;;;

Source: MBC