South Park is having its best season ever, lampooning every aspect of the contemporary media cycle in glorious fashion. Wednesday night’s episode pushed it to the extreme, tying together the presidential election, internet trolls and member berries. There are going to be spoilers ahead but if you aren’t caught up on Season 7 anyways, what are you doing with your life?
On last night’s episode, titled “Fort Collins,” South Parks’ Willy Wonka version of Sweden finally figured out a way to catch internet trolls and expunge their entire internet history to the world. Turns out they were only missing one piece of the puzzle, which came from Heidi of all places.
Emojis, those tiny little faces in our phones, have taken over our language. In South Park and the real world, like speech or grammar, every person has their own unique emojis that they love to use above all others. Maybe you throw a smiley faced poop in instead of “lol” or a purple faced devil to imply sarcasm. In order to find the ultimate troll, Skankhunt42, Heidi used “emoji analysis.”
Matt Stone and Trey Parker continue to push the boundaries of social norms, creating the only on-air television show I would classify as satire. South Park always manages to inspire new ideas and come up with something entirely amazing out of left field. Heidi’s “emoji analysis” allows her to figure out each student and teacher’s emoji usage and comparing it with the troll we all know is Kyle’s dad.
Could someone figure out who is actually typing a message based on what emojis they use? We all write text messages in our own voice; some use perfect grammar, while others think that typing “b” and forgetting the “e” is totally okay. Emojis only sprang up in the last couple of years, so there’s very little concrete evidence on how they are affecting how we communicate.
“Emoji analysis” isn’t a real science yet, but we are slowly starting to get there. According to Emogi, a messaging app, 92 percent of internet users use emojis in their messaging. I’m sure that number is extremely inflated, but it still has to be a really high number. Even my grandma uses emojis, and she hates new technology enough to still use AOL for email.
In an apocalyptic future, we might only communicate with hieroglyphics, choosing to throw the written language out completely for smiley faces with sunglasses and eggplants.
