More Web Proxy on the site http://driver.im/

research-article

Repurposing Emoji for Personalised Communication: Why 🍕 means “I love you”

Authors:

Sandy J. J. GouldAuthors Info & Claims

CHI '18: Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Paper No.: 152, Pages 1 - 10

https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3173726

Published: 19 April 2018 Publication History

Abstract

The use of emoji in digital communication can convey a wealth of emotions and concepts that otherwise would take many words to express. Emoji have become a popular form of communication, with researchers claiming emoji represent a type of "ubiquitous language" that can span different languages. In this paper however, we explore how emoji are also used in highly personalised and purposefully secretive ways. We show that emoji are repurposed for something other than their "intended" use between close partners, family members and friends. We present the range of reasons why certain emoji get chosen, including the concept of "emoji affordance" and explore why repurposing occurs. Normally used for speed, some emoji are instead used to convey intimate and personal sentiments that, for many reasons, their users cannot express in words. We discuss how this form of repurposing must be considered in tasks such as emoji-based sentiment analysis.

Supplementary Material

suppl.mov (pn2004-file5.mp4)

Supplemental video

Download
1.75 MB

MP4 File (pn2004.mp4)

Download
194.03 MB

References

[1]

Hamdan Azhar. 2016. How We Really Use The Peach. Emojipedia. Retrieved from https://blog.emojipedia.org/how-we-really-use-thepeach/

[2]

Paul Baker. 2003. Polari-the lost language of gay men. Routledge.

[3]

Francesco Barbieri, German Kruszewski, Francesco Ronzano, and Horacio Saggion. 2016. How Cosmopolitan Are Emojis?: Exploring Emojis Usage and Meaning over Different Languages with Distributional Semantics. Proceedings of the 2016 ACM on Multimedia Conference, 531--535.

Digital Library

[4]

Edwin Chan, Teddy Seyed, Wolfgang Stuerzlinger, Xing-Dong Yang, and Frank Maurer. 2016. User Elicitation on Single-hand Microgestures. Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 3403--3414.

Digital Library

[5]

Zhenpeng Chen, Xuan Lu, Sheng Shen, Wei Ai, Xuanzhe Liu, and Qiaozhu Mei. 2017. Through a Gender Lens: An Empirical Study of Emoji Usage over Large-Scale Android Users. 1--20. Retrieved from http://arxiv.org/abs/1705.05546

[6]

Henriette Cramer, Paloma de Juan, and Joel Tetreault. 2016. Sender-intended Functions of Emojis in US Messaging. Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services, 504-- 509.

Digital Library

[7]

Maurizio Gotti. 1999. The language of thieves and vagabonds: 17th and 18th century canting lexicography in England. Walter de Gruyter.

[8]

Jialun "Aaron" Jiang, Jed R. Brubaker, and Casey Fiesler. 2017. Understanding Diverse Interpretations of Animated GIFs. CHI'17 Extended Abstracts, 1726--1732.

Digital Library

[9]

Ryan Kelly and Leon Watts. 2015. Characterising the Inventive Appropriation of Emoji as Relationally Meaningful in Mediated Close Personal Relationships. Experiences of Technology Appropriation: Unanticipated Users, Usage, Circumstances, and Design.

[10]

Brian Koerber. 2016. People are mad as hell after Apple ruins the peach emoji. Mashable. Retrieved from http://mashable.com/2016/11/01/peach-emojibutt-no-more/#y0IZqe3q7iqd

[11]

Xuan Lu, Wei Ai, Xuanzhe Liu, et al. 2016. Learning from the ubiquitous language. Proceedings of the 2016 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing - UbiComp '16, ACM Press, 770--780.

Digital Library

[12]

Hannah Miller, Daniel Kluver, Jacob ThebaultSpieker, Loren Terveen, and Brent Hecht. 2017. Understanding Emoji Ambiguity in Context: The Role of Text in Emoji-Related Miscommunication. Proceedings of the Eleventh International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, 152--161. Retrieved from https://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/ICWS M17/paper/view/15703

[13]

Hannah Miller, Jacob Thebault-Spieker, Shuo Chang, Isaac Johnson, Loren Terveen, and Brent Hecht. 2016. "Blissfully happy" or "ready to fight": Varying Interpretations of Emoji. International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, Icwsm, 259--268.

[14]

Midas Nouwens, Carla Griggio, and Wendy E Mackay. 2017. "WhatsApp is for family; Messenger is for friends": Communication Places in App Ecosystems. CHI '17 - Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 727--735.

Digital Library

[15]

Oxford Dictionaries. 2015. Word of the Year 2015. Retrieved from https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/word-of-theyear/word-of-the-year-2015

[16]

Jaram Park, Vladimir Barash, Clay Fink, and Meeyoung Cha. 2013. Emoticon Style: Interpreting Differences in Emoticons Across Cultures. Proceedings of the 7th International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM), 466--475.

[17]

Ann Senghas, Sotaro Kita, and Asli Özyürek. 2004. Children Creating Core Properties of Language: Evidence from an Emerging Sign Language in Nicaragua. Science 305, 5691, 1779--1782.

[18]

Selina Sutton and Shaun Lawson. 2017. A Provocation for Rethinking and Democratising Emoji Design. Proceedings of the 2016 ACM Conference Companion Publication on Designing Interactive Systems - DIS '17 Companion, ACM Press, 7--12.

Digital Library

[19]

Swiftkey. 2015. Swiftkey Emoji Report. Retrieved from http://www.scribd.com/doc/262594751/SwiftKeyEmoji-Report

[20]

K Thorpe, R Greenwood, a Eivers, and M Rutter. 2001. Prevalence and developmental course of "secret language". International journal of language & communication disorders / Royal College of Speech & Language Therapists 36, 1, 43--62.

[21]

Garreth W Tigwell and David R. Flatla. 2016. " Oh that's what you meant?!": Reducing Emoji Misunderstanding. Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services Adjunct (MobileHCI '16), 859--866. http://doi.org/2957265.2961844

Digital Library

[22]

Unicode Inc. 2017. Emoji and Pictographs. Retrieved from http://www.unicode.org/faq/emoji_dingbats.html

[23]

Joseph B. Walther and Kyle P. D'Addario. 2001. The Impacts of Emoticons on Message Interpretation in Computer-Mediated Communication. Social Science Computer Review 19, 3, 324--347.

[24]

Sanjaya Wijeratne, Lakshika Balasuriya, Amit Sheth, and Derek Doran. 2017. EmojiNet: An Open Service and API for Emoji Sense Discovery. the 11Th International Aaai Conference on Web and Social Media (Icwsm-17), May, 437--446. Retrieved from https://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/ICWS M17/paper/view/15551

[25]

Sanjaya Wijeratne, Lakshika Balasuriya, Amit Sheth, and Derek Doran. 2017. A Semantics-Based Measure of Emoji Similarity.

Digital Library

Cited By

Buczek-Zawiła A(2024)Personalizing Emoji Meaning and Use in Digital CommunicationPrace Językoznawcze10.31648/pj.1014526:2(185-201)Online publication date: 30-Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.31648/pj.10145
Griggio CGorman BTigwell G(2024)Party Face Congratulations! Exploring Design Ideas to Help Sighted Users with Emoji Accessibility when Messaging with Screen Reader UsersProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36410148:CSCW1(1-31)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3641014
Teng SD'Alfonso SKostakos V(2024)A Tool for Capturing Smartphone Screen TextProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642347(1-24)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613904.3642347
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Repurposing Emoji for Personalised Communication: Why 🍕 means “I love you”
1. Human-centered computing

Recommendations

A frown emoji can be worth a thousand words

Text messaging helps promoting relationship quality.The impact of using emoji in text messages is still unclear.Positive messages were unaffected by adding emoji (Study 1).Negative messages with emoji signaled greater relationship interest (Studies 12)...
The Emoji Spatial Stroop Task: Exploring the impact of vertical positioning of emoji on emotional processing
Abstract
Despite emoji often being assumed to be a form of emotional communication, the emotional affordances of these are not yet fully established. The current study employed the Emoji Spatial Stroop Task to explore whether spatial iconicity ...
Highlights
- Emoji Spatial Stroop Task measures spatial iconicity on semantic-related judgments.
Exploring the (lack of) facilitative effect of emoji for word processing
Abstract
We explore whether emoji were associatively linked to emotion concepts represented in emotion-laden words, in line with the Associative-Propositional Evaluation model. Specifically, we tested these principles by exploring whether ...
Highlights
- Emoji do not appear to support processing advantages in word processing.
- Emoji ...

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

CHI '18: Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

April 2018

8489 pages

ISBN:9781450356206

DOI:10.1145/3173574

General Chairs:
Regan Mandryk
University of Saskatchewan, Canada
,
Mark Hancock
University of Waterloo, Canada
,
Program Chairs:
Mark Perry
Brunel University London, UK
,
Anna Cox
University College London, UK

Copyright © 2018 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

Sponsors

SIGCHI: ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 19 April 2018

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Conference

CHI '18

Sponsor:

SIGCHI

CHI '18: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

April 21 - 26, 2018

Montreal QC, Canada

Acceptance Rates

CHI '18 Paper Acceptance Rate 666 of 2,590 submissions, 26%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%

Upcoming Conference

CHI 2025

Sponsor:
sigchi

ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

April 26 - May 1, 2025

Yokohama , Japan

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

47
Total Citations
View Citations
2,224
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)207
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)43

Reflects downloads up to 13 Dec 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Buczek-Zawiła A(2024)Personalizing Emoji Meaning and Use in Digital CommunicationPrace Językoznawcze10.31648/pj.1014526:2(185-201)Online publication date: 30-Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.31648/pj.10145
Griggio CGorman BTigwell G(2024)Party Face Congratulations! Exploring Design Ideas to Help Sighted Users with Emoji Accessibility when Messaging with Screen Reader UsersProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36410148:CSCW1(1-31)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3641014
Teng SD'Alfonso SKostakos V(2024)A Tool for Capturing Smartphone Screen TextProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642347(1-24)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613904.3642347
An PZhu JZhang ZYin YMa QYan CDu LZhao J(2024)EmoWear: Exploring Emotional Teasers for Voice Message Interaction on SmartwatchesProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642101(1-16)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613904.3642101
Almaguer JFelix RHarmeling C(2024)Emoji marketing: Toward a theory of brand paralinguisticsInternational Journal of Research in Marketing10.1016/j.ijresmar.2024.06.002Online publication date: Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijresmar.2024.06.002
Hancock PHilverman CCook SHalvorson K(2023)Emoji as gesture in digital communication: Emoji improve comprehension of indirect speechPsychonomic Bulletin & Review10.3758/s13423-023-02411-131:3(1335-1347)Online publication date: 27-Nov-2023
https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-023-02411-1
Ji CKim LMikami AReid ERobinson RTodd RKarasavva VMaclean KIsbister K(2023)Sharing Feelings via Mini Robot GesturesProceedings of the 2nd Empathy-Centric Design Workshop10.1145/3588967.3588968(1-5)Online publication date: 23-Apr-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3588967.3588968
An PZhang CGao HZhou ZDu LYan CXiao YZhao J(2023)Affective Affordance of Message Balloon Animations: An Early Exploration of AniBalloonsCompanion Publication of the 2023 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing10.1145/3584931.3607017(138-143)Online publication date: 14-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3584931.3607017
Scott LCoventry LCecchinato MWarner M(2023)“I figured her feeling a little bit bad was worth it to not spread that kind of hate”: Exploring how UK families discuss and challenge misinformationProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3581202(1-15)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3544548.3581202
Kim YIm HLee SCho HLee S(2023)“We Speak Visually”: User-Generated Icons for Better Video-Mediated Mixed-Group Communications Between Deaf and Hearing ParticipantsProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3581151(1-16)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3544548.3581151
Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents