why it makes sense to think of emoticons and emoji as gestural rather than emotional: thinking this way resolves the apparent contradiction between emotional facial expressions and the emoticons that supposedly represent them. Sure, it’s constructed, but a thumbs up is constructed, too, and both can still be genuine. If we say instead that people are consciously using them to guide their readers to the correct interpretation of their words, then emoticons become a positive, helpful, social behavior, a way of saying, “I want to clarify my true intentions for you.”
