The smiley face is now so endemic to American culture that it’s easy to forget it is an invented artifact.

What if we could integrate our understand of these two faces of immaterial labor through the image of yet another face? Affective labor is another term for what sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild calls “emotional labor,” the commercialization of feelings that smooth our social interactions on a daily basis. All this computerized work is, according to Michael Hardt, one face of what he terms immaterial labor, or “labor that produces an immaterial good, such as a service, knowledge, or communication.” “We increasingly think like computers,” he writes, but “the other face of immaterial labor is the affective labor of human conduct and interaction” - all those fast-food greetings, the casual banter with the Uber driver, the flight attendant’s smile, the nurse patting your arm as the needle goes in. Innocuous and omnipresent, emoji are the social lubricant smoothing the rough edges of our digital lives: They underscore tone, introduce humor, and give us a quick way to bring personality into otherwise monochrome spaces. And in their own, highly compressed lexicon, emoji are trying to tell us something about the nature of feelings, of labor, and the new horizons of capitalism. Yet emoji have a rich and complex history behind the campy shtick: From the rise of the smiley in the second half of the 20th century, emoji emerged out of corporate strategies, copyright claims, and standards disputes to become a ubiquitous digital shorthand. It was seen as another entry in the gimmick-social-network category, to be filed alongside Yo.

This news, announced in late June, was met with a combination of scorn and amusement from the tech press. The world will soon have its first emoji-only social network: Emoj.li. You'll see the sun come shining through for you If you smile through your fear and sorrow Emoji offer you new possibilities for digital expression, but only if you’re speaking their language

Grids for instagram emojis