It’s a familiar situation – you’re trying to organise a night out but everyone in your WhatsApp group is coming up with a different place or time to meet. Plus you have a hundred other emails to answer, notifications are popping up and a meeting’s about to start. Instead of a lengthy reply, you send a 👍 to one person’s suggestion of dinner.

This is the age of constant connection – and distraction. Emails, Instagram, Skype and Facebook all make it easy to stay in touch with a wide network of friends, yet the time required to actively maintain these links is often lacking. Enter emoji. Simple, fast and increasingly ubiquitous, emoji offer an immediate point of communication. Take the dinner confirmation, for example: you can make yourself clear without typing a single word. This is a widespread phenomenon. ;Emojitracker, a website that shows real-time emoji use on Twitter, gives an insight into their overwhelming popularity: its tallies of hearts, crying faces and pizza slices reach the millions.

Emoji are becoming embedded into popular culture, from the full translation of Moby Dick into Emoji Dick to Drake’s praying hands tattoo, and they have even extended into broader societal issues. The success of the long-standing campaign for greater racial diversity in the emoji spectrum resulted in a major Apple update in April 2015, signalling a transition from frivolous smileys to a more legitimate mode of communication.