Born to stir: instant affect culture and the kitsch aesthetics of emoji images

Emojis are small icons used across digital devices and platforms, and this essay explores their aesthetics to argue that they exemplify kitsch in contemporary digital culture. While visually comforting images have appeared in past eras, the digital environment intensifies this tendency through rapid circulation, immediate emotional impact, and widespread commodification, creating a distinct form of contemporary kitsch. In this instant affect culture, hyper-sentimentality operates alongside aesthetic reassurance, driving what might be called a hyper-kitsch digital economy. In line with this aesthetic spirit and built on conventional realism, emojis exhibit six key traits of kitsch: sentimentality, simplification, explicitness, commercialization, mass production, and decorative motifs. The essay examines how their kitschiness can perpetuate potentially problematic tendencies in digital communication, such as exaggerated reactivity and deceptive positivity, and concludes by reflecting on kitsch—and emojis’ kitschiness—as a response to the human desire for emotional safety and certainty.