In the past few weeks, two internet savvy generations have clashed in videos and comments on TikTok about the marks of millennial culture that are now considered non-legal by Gen Z. The list includes skinny jeans (Gen Z verdict: set fire), side parts (Generation Z verdict: middle part or bust) and perhaps the most painful of all, the popular cry and laugh emoji that some millennials, including me, use hundreds of times a day or more.
“What’s wrong with the smiley emoji[?]”asked one user in a TikTok comment. Another replied,” it’s so weird. “In a different video of a woman saying that she stopped using it after learning that children don’t, a teenager commented,” At 15 years old I say you should use this bc emoji [because] we certainly won’t. “
“I use everything but the smiley emoji,” Walid Mohammed, 21, told CNN Business. “I stopped using it a while ago because I saw older people using it, like my mom, my older siblings and just older people in general.”
For many members of Generation Z, the skull emoji has become a popular replacement for conveying laughter. It is the visual version of the slang “I am dead” or “I am dying”, which means that something is very funny. Other acceptable alternatives: the emoji (officially called “Loudly Crying Face”), or just writing “lol” (laughing out loud) or “lmao” (laughing, well, you probably know the rest).
Xavier Martin, aged seventeen, called the emoji the “cry of laughter” “boring” and said that “few people” his age use it. Stacy Thiru, 21, prefers the real crying emoji because it shows a more extreme emotion and looks more dramatic. She said she couldn’t even find the emoji laughing and crying on the keyboard of her iPhone.
A similar emoji, called “Rolling on the Floor Laughing”, is also no longer in fashion. When asked about that emoji during a video call, Thiru visibly winced. “I don’t like this one,” she said. “My mom doesn’t even use it.”
“Face with Tears of Joy”, the official name of the laughing and crying emoji, is currently the most used emoji on Emojitracker, a website that shows the use of emoji in real time on Twitter. He led Emojipedia’s list of the most used emojis on Twitter in 2020, while “Loudly Crying Face” came in second. And he has resistance: in 2017, Apple said the laugh and cry emoji was the most popular in the United States.
“Tears of Joy was a victim of its own success,” said Gretchen McCulloch, an Internet linguist and author of “Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language”.
“If you indicate digital laughter for years and years in the same way, it starts to look fake … Hyperbole runs out with continued use,” she said. That’s why Generation Z may be looking for new and innovative ways to signal that it’s laughing in different ways.
Gen Zers – born after 1996 – grew up at a time when the internet was already ubiquitous and was often in the palm of your hands. Some millennials, by comparison, remember a time before the constant immersion in the Internet; many entered the world of emojis and Internet jargon not through text messages or social media, but through AOL Instant Messenger. (The millennium generation was born between 1981 and 1996, according to the Pew Research Center).
Interestingly, older generations tend to use emojis literally, while younger ones get more creative, said Jeremy Burge, the director of emojis at Emojipedia, an emoji dictionary website. Emojipedia recently wrote a blog post that said, “It is common sense in TikTok that the emoji that cries and laughs is for boomers.”
The Gen Zers told CNN Business that they like to attribute their own meanings to emojis, which then spread to others in their cohort, usually through social media. For example, the emoji of a person wearing a cowboy hat () and that of a person simply standing up now means embarrassment. Others put together a bunch of positive emojis, like stars, rainbows and fairies, and then associate them with something negative. “Our generation is very sarcastic,” said Martin.
Sometimes teenagers and young people in their twenties use emoji – like the one who laughs and cries – ironically, like sending six or seven of them in a row to friends, to exaggerate. But in general, this emoji is impossible.
“For Generation Z, it’s the same as having an Android,” said Mohammed.
The video in the media player above was used in an earlier report.
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