Not sure that mobile is taking over everything yet? Then you must not have heard what the Oxford word of the year is…

Yes, you heard that right, the Oxford word of the year is…

  
That’s right, its an emoji. To be more specific, it is the “Face With Tears of Joy” emoji, or the LOL Emoji, or even the Laughing Emoji.

Here’s what happened. 

Oxford University Press (OUP) worked with SwiftKey (an alternative keyboard for Android and iOS) to determine which emoji was the most popular this year. And according to the OUP, 

“Emoji have come to emody a core aspect of living in a digital world that is visually driven, emotionally expressive, and obsessively immediate.”

And to that I say, 

(that last one is my favorite emoji…I think its supposed to be something positive, but I think it looks like a happy poop)

Here’s what all this means.

Today, people communicate with their friends and acquaintances mostly via their mobile device. And the younger they are, the more they do so with emoji’s and abbreviated words (LOL, brb, and dilligas*.) People are comfortable with this style of communication now and I don’t think that’s going to change. 

In fact, I think this kind of communication will start to permeate other areas, such as email, journalism, and <GASP> blogging. Less words, more abbreviations, and certainly more visuals. Long-form articles and heck, even long-form sentences, aren’t things that today’s young person wants to waste their time with. If they see stuff like that, they’ll give you one of these: tl;dr

* Look it up, I had to.