This post is dedicated to…. Emojis. This is an unexpected source of research someone might say but if you really think how much we use emojis in our everyday lives you will probably understand why researchers like Sarah Wiseman chose to study them. If you don’t believe me, in order to take a small taste of how much emojies are being used across the internet world you can have a look to his Emoji- tracker website which shows the real time use of emojies only on the twitter.
Sarah Wiseman has visited Goldsmiths and she expatiated her research on emojies. She presented her paper “Repurposing Emoji for Personalised Communication: Why � means “I love you” ”(1) in which she presented various approaches on the explanation of emojis use, her methodology of research and her results.
If we take a moment we can all imaging an emoji that we use the most, then have to think how we use this emoji. Does it have a specific meaning for us? Do we use it differently with different people? These questions are some of the questions that leaded this research. In the aforementioned paper you can read about how emojis that are interpreted differently from each user can cause problem on the communication. Especially considering that emojis are mainly used for expressing emotions.
Another interesting outcome from this research is that emojis are used by small groups of people with internal communication meaning creating that way, micro-communities. This is very common phenomenon between friends but also in families. People in this case can use emojis with a totally different meaning than the one that they ostensibly have.
In this point it also worth mention the methodology that Sarah used in order to expand the emoticons research field. She used a form of survey to collect data regarding the use of emojis and in particular the repurposing of them according to the recipient. The results are really interesting; the biggest presentence won the emojis used in a communication between love partners. In a smaller percentage comes the emojis used between friends and families and it appears that no one on the survey report the use on group or public chats. From the results of this survey she has also extract a number of categories regarding emojis sentiment meaning, reason of choice of the emoji, and reason of sending the emoji.
If you look back on time and on the way we were communicating before emojis it worth now thinking all these aspects of this research and consider all the aspects in our communication that have changes due to emojis existence. Maybe it worth research how communication and relationships have changed during this period that we are using them.
(1)Wiseman, Sarah, & Gould, Sandy J.J. (2018). Repurposing Emoji for Personalised Communication: Why pizza slice emoji means “I love you”.