Know Your Hashtag: #EmojisInTheWild

Instagrammers are capturing the world’s IRL emojis with well-filtered field notes

April 28, 2015, 10:00pm

The emoji takeover has reached critical mass, as documented by Instagrammers worldwide. The invasion began, it seems, as emojis snuck their way through various social media and into photo editing applications, like Phonto and Snapchat, allowing us to insert their pleasing little pictorials into the mundanity of real life. Now, brave Instagram explorers have sought out the emoji in its true and tangible form, capturing the world’s IRL emojis with well-filtered field notes and photographic evidence under the #EmojisInTheWild hashtag.

A dive into this ideographic meta-narrative reveals a few specific trends: some people are finding troves of “found-Emojis,” waiting to be captured in their natural environments. Some question whether art imitates emoji, or emoji imitates art. Others still extract more abstract emojis with their own crafty creations and photo manipulations. And finally, there are those for whom the emoji retains its simplistic form to the last detail, recreated in full and inserted into everyday life to uncanny ends.

Below, see how #EmojisInTheWild encapsulates diverse documentation of the emoji alphabet, ushering in beautifully edited images, nature shots, and fresh perspectives, all the while blurring the shaky divide between reality and, well, emoji.