Blog 2 - Josh Freetly

 Emojis are used in two primary ways for me personally, to react to or to emphasize something in the conversation. The reaction emojis enhance the conversation by making something like texting that can be rather impersonal feel more like a face-to-face conversation and help me feel closer to my friends and family. My favored emojis for reactions are hearts and various faces (🖤, 😂, 😭) with the laughing and crying faces being the most used as they convey my reaction in a more vivid way than saying something like "lol" or "that's messed up". With the hearts, I use many different colors with the black and red ones being the most used and this helps convey the feeling with warm colors for extreme joys and cooler colors for a less dramatic feel to the reaction. Emojis used for emphasis add to the conversation by conveying a verbal cue that is usually very hard to convey over text. The primary emoji I use to do this is the three sparkle emoji (✨) at the beginning and end of a word or text. This is like using italics in a story for me as it conveys emphasizing a word for effect. Not having the reactions would make it harder to convey how something is making me feel without a flowery explanation. Not having the sparkles for emphasis would make it impossible to convey an emphasis for effect something that is normally very easy verbally.