Emojis and Culture

Emojis are universal, right?  These simple symbols would appear to be straight forward enough in their meaning to transcend culture. However...

No matter how hard we try to avoid it, culture has a way of affecting how we see and interpret the things around us, and that includes emojis.  A group of researchers recently found that different people had vastly different interpretations of some popular emojis.  The researchers found that when people receive the "face with tears of joy" emoji — which Oxford Dictionaries declared its word of the year — some understand it positively and others interpret it negatively. "We find that only 4.5 percent of emoji symbols we examined have consistently low variance in their sentiment interpretations," the researchers said. "[I]n 25 percent of the cases where participants rated the same rendering, they did not agree on whether the sentiment was positive, neutral, or negative."  It only gets more complicated when you're texting across platforms, because the same emojis are rendered differently on different devices.  

 

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