THE SUPPORTIVE EMOJI
The increased use of emoji over the last decade has created a wide-spread visual-text hybrid communication style that have been “found to overcome language, cultural and national barriers.” (Adami & Cecchini, 2019, p.32). This style of writing is helping to improve CMC (computer-mediated communication) by allowing users to interject emotions and non-verbal cues. Kerslake and Wegerif discuss how Shingetaka Kurita, the designer of emoji, emphasizes this concept by drawing attention to the medium of digital communication and its lack of ability for emotional expression:
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As emoji are available on multiple platforms, the sentiment behind statements transcends boundaries to ensure users that their non-verbal cues will be heard.
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“it is the rise of digital communication, a medium which doesn’t readily allow for expressions of emotion, which made the use of emoji necessary to compensate for the inability to convey facial expression, tone of voice, and gesture in a digital communication” (2017, p.75).
Gn provides an example to demonstration how emoji can help clarify the sentiment behind statements (2018):
1) Peter might be wrong
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2) Peter might be wrong
😕
😉
These “instinctive yet reductive” icons (Abidin &Gn, 2018, p.9) are impacting not only personal communications, but are permeating into other areas like political, marketing, psychology, and educational spheres (Bai et al., 2019, p.3). Authors using CMC, no matter what area they are affiliated with, are no longer bound by text.
Emoji’s importance to communication was solidified in November of 2015 when the face with tears of joy emoji (😂) was chosen as Oxford English Dictionary’s word of the year (Berdard, 2018). Theses characters are helping to overcome restraints of text-only communication, however, misinterpretations can occur. As the number of emoji increases, users need to be aware of the message behind each emoji and thoughtful in the choice of emoji.