Beyoncé Viral Video Proves Emojis Are Here to Stay

Sometimes two great things come together to create complete and total, life-changing amazing-ness. Peanut butter and jelly. Birthdays and cake. Lazy Sunday evenings and Game of Thrones. You get the picture. Well, now two massive cultural phenomena have combined to create a little slice of the Internet that’s destined to go supernova: Beyoncé and emoji.

Enter the Beyoncé “Drunk in Love” emoji music video. The world’s obsession with queen Bey has reached fever pitch since the epic release of her new video album (see Alden’s previous post), and emojis are an essential component of texting for any self-respecting millennial.  The combination of the two in this unofficial video leads me to two thoughts:

1. Who on earth has this amount of free time?
2. Who cares? This is the funniest thing I’ve seen this week – quite a feat for someone who spends as much time on the internet and social media as a Digital Marketing Specialist. Mad respect.

I am here to argue that this video proves what my friends and I have long known: The emoji is a legitimate, bordering on necessary, form of communication. There are some things that just can’t be expressed in words like it can with emojis.  In fact, it is frustrating me immensely in this moment that I cannot share my excitement over this video as such: dead-from-shock face, gasping cat, clapping, dancing girl, radiating heart, martini, cat-in-love, and confetti.

On a (slightly) more serious note though, I think this viral video begs the question: When does a form of communication become so prevalent that it’s recognized as a language or dialect in its own right? It’s something to think about, especially since most of us text more frequently than we talk on the phone – or in person – to some of our friends and family. I won’t be adding “fluent in emoji” to the languages section of my resumé quite yet, but the fact that we’re asking the question means that emojis have become part of our vernacular.

I for one wouldn’t want it any other way. (grinning emoji).