**Emoji serve a similar purpose to gestures.** From a functional perspective - emoji fulfill a very similar role in chat-based conversations as gestures do in real-world in-person conversations. They carry some semantic meaning, but not much. They, however, can provide great context to the words that are used. `I had fun 😄.` is very different than `I had fun 😴.` The smiley face :-) was invented as a suggestion to prevent sarcastic messages from being taken seriously. **** # More ## Source - [[Because Internet]] ## Related