This chapter explores how emoji can function as a resource operating in the service of ambient affiliation, which unlike the dialogic affiliation explored in the previous chapter, does not rely on direct interaction. The chapter analyses the role of emoji in finessing and promoting the social bonds that are tabled to ambient audiences in social media posts. It also investigates their role in calling together, or convoking, ambient communities to align around shared values or alternatively contest those values. A specialised corpus of tweets about the NSW state government’s COVID-19 pandemic response in Australia is used to show how emoji both interact with their co-text as well as support the tabling of bonds to potential audiences or interactants. The analysis reveals how emoji tended to both buttress and boost negative judgement by adding additional layers of negative assessment as well as to muster communities around the critical bonds which they had helped to enact.

This chapter summarises the model developed for exploring emoji-text convergence in this book. It reviews the system network for describing this convergence which was built up progressively throughout, covering textual synchronicity, ideational concurrence, and interpersonal resonance. The chapter also consolidates the book’s exploration of the role of emoji in negotiating and communing around social bonds through affiliation. The chapter works through a full analysis of an extract from a Twitter thread to show how the various kinds of analysis developed in the book might be deployed, drawing on the complete convergence network as well as the affiliation networks. The chapter concludes by underscoring the crucial role that linguists might play as emoji and other forms of digital paralanguage increase in cultural prominence