Cutie-Pie Effect As A Modern Emotional Trend

Surfing the Social Media resources we face the variety of photos and videos with pretty things like kittens, puppies, lovers or anything else that makes us exclaim: “Oh, how cute!”. The website Emojipedia brought up a list of the most popular emojis for the last year. One of them is Smiling Face With Heart-Eyes, which means that the feeling of admiration is extremely popular around the world. What makes people from all over the world watch adorable videos with kittens and send messages with "rainbow puke" and "dog with tongue" lenses via Snapchat? Is it a trend of Millenials or just a new form of eternal expression? 

To begin with, let's deal with the dictionary. Asking young people in Ada what words they may use instead of Smiling Face With Heart-Eyes or Smiling face with smiling eyes emojis, I received the following results. The most popular words are sweetie, cutie-pie, chunk, adorable, tender, precious, attractive. So, we may see that the emojis are usually used to express delight caused by the extremely cute and gentle story. 

We may find the feeling of gentleness and kindness in religion. For example, the icon of Madonna with the Child named Tenderness exists in Eastern and Western Christian cultures and "tenderness" here expresses joy and sorrow that makes a human being closer to God. Some philosophers of the Age of Enlightenment also covered the topis of gentleness. Immanuel Kant in “Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason” brings together religious and aesthetic aspects of admiration. He believed that a human should go through the stages from admiration for the beauty, good, truth formation to involvement in civil processes. So is there any connection between Kant's thought and Smiling Face With Heart-Eyes? It seems more likely no than yes.  

Nowadays we are answering messages by stickers or emojis more and more often. We use them instead of words and sentences. The emotions usually manifest themselves through creolized texts. Their texture is usually made up of two different parts: verbal (linguistic) and nonverbal (belonging to other sign systems rather than natural language). A similar scheme is used in advertising, comic books, posters, internet articles, and posts, etc. Even politicians have their accounts on Twitter and Instagram where they communicate by emoji. Different sites and even newspapers publish political stickers with Donald Trump’s, Hilary Clinton’s and other images. Russian messaging app “Telegram” offers funny stickers with faces of Putin, Medvedev, Trump, Obama, and others. Cutie-pie phenomenon is a characteristic of the XXIst century and it points out on weakness of political views and common tiredness from ideologies. This emotion is not an erotic sense, it may be just a reaction to the sexualization of the consumer society.

But why do we use this method of expressing emotions instead of high definitions of beauty or kindness? The reason may be in universal usage of delight caused by cute things. Not everyone considers themselves to be a competent participant in political dialogue, but anyone can estimate koala bear. By the way, the admiration of chock kittens avoids any sort of a conflict as it does not have any comparison grades. Emoji universality or the global interest in cats firstly allows us to feel the unity of the whole of mankind without political or language barriers. They also teach us how to express unclear opinions. Supposing, I agree with the politician words but inwardly I do not trust him or her. In this case, I could answer by a smiley face instead of saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Nevertheless, the constant search for something precious may cause the avoidance of coping with real social and political problems. So, sometimes people would prefer watching a video with cats than watching the news. 

To conclude, I would like to point out that the Cutie-pie effect is a natural result of the globalization. It is just the way people react to the world’s terrifying problems like terrorism, incurable diseases, violence, etc. The popularity of adorable pictures, photos, videos, memes shows us that we are all human beings and we all need something sweet in everyday life.