✨An Emoji For Our Times
Chai Society Dispatch Season IV Episode 1
✨This month’s #ChaiSociety Dispatch comes on the eve of Education and Sharing Day, the annual day established by Congress and proclaimed by the President in honor of the Rebbe’s day of birth. This year is particularly important, as it marks 120 years since the Rebbe was born in Mykolaiv, Ukraine.
Tech Tribe has a bevy of exciting events and initiatives we’ll be rolling out to mark this anniversary - and we’re excited to share the very first one with you today!
💡 Think:
Recent years have shown just how interconnected we are. Our health, society and communities are deeply intertwined.
Emoji have become the language of our interconnected lives. Over one in five tweets now includes an emoji, 5 billion emojis are sent daily on Facebook Messenger.
Yet when we talk about the good we want to do, share the causes that are important to us, no emoji exists to capture this message.
Now the time has come to create the language the Internet needs to express it. It’s time for a new Emoji that will call us to action.
I’ve long believed in digital media as a tool for change - not just greater ease in conversation, but rather as vessels for creating actual positive good in this world. This approach represents not only a theoretical expression of what tech can do, but rather is an expression of its core purpose.
Yes, we can use social media to spread disinformation, or to distract us, but those avenues are merely perversions of its true purpose.The free choice is given to us to reveal its inner good.
The use of technology to do good has perhaps no greater expression than through social giving and good. I mean this not only in terms of this very newsletter that you read —fueled by your giving as members of the #ChaiSociety (thank you!)— but rather to all the myriads of ways that we use technology to create very real, very needed aid for others. Looking now at the unfolding humanitarian crisis with the war in Ukraine, the tangible lifesaving good that people have been able to do by galvanizing their networks to give has been critical.
The Rebbe explored this idea in 1991: At the dawn of the Internet era, it became possible to not only learn about someone’s need for help on the other side of the world instantaneously, but to also be able to do real world good for that person as well. Suddenly, hearing about a person in need in Calcutta, was also an opportunity to instantly help - get in touch, wire funds, whatever was needed.
Where do Emoji come in? With all the benefits of the Internet in the world of communication, it’s intermediated between us and others, often hiding the shared humanity.
Emoji provide critical context to our messages - they help show our intent and can convey, in a single image, needed information.
Interestingly a 2016 study found that people who commonly used emoji were more socially receptive and empathetic.
And here the two concepts come together: