Are emojis, internet lingo, and "stickers" destroying our ability to effectively communicate?

This is a funny topic for me to talk about as I am far from "anti" any of these things. Or, that is, I use internet speak a lot with some of my online friends and I love some facebook stickers. I also run multiple meme pages on facebook and make and share memes with many of the same friends I speak with in net-lingo and stickers. I noticed though, today, as I was sending one of my all-time favorite stickers:

...that maybe I was using this sticker as a placeholder for expressing my actual feelings. And maybe I use them so often that it is legitimately messing up my ability to answer "How are you?" without turning my shitty day into a joke. "Hm...Do I answer that honestly or...."

Send a sticker.

So, possibly sending stickers in place of articulated responses to serious questions could be messing with our ability to convey feelings. I am sure I am not the only one who has paused in front of my computer when asked a question, debating how to explain myself and why I feel whatever way I feel, and then ultimately decided to send a sticker instead.

But, what about communication in general? More specifically, what about all this abbreviating.

Example:

*LMAO omg wtf....

This is just one example but some of my friends are almost always using net-lingo and stickers (including myself) and I can't help but wonder if it's fucking up our ability to articulate our feelings. When everything becomes abbreviated and reduced to 2-3 letters, what becomes of the English language and a person's personal ability to effectively articulate ideas, concepts, and feelings?

Nobody could deny that net-speak is changing our language

With words like "WTF", and "NSFW" being added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary recently.

http://unabridged.merriam-webster.com/blog/2015/05/a-growth-spurt/

So, the question is: Is it a bad thing?

Do you think that internet-lingo is destroying the English language? Do you think emojis and stickers are changing people's ability to express real emotions? This is just something I think about a lot. I haven't come to any solid conclusion, and maybe that's because I would have to face-up and stop expressing myself with a sticker and 3 upper-case letters.

L8R

Photos:

Candy heart - Wikimedia commons

Sticker images:
http://stickersocial.net/