Abstract
In recent years, Emojis have permeated online communications. They constantly show up in text messages, chats and emails, playing a significant role in business and daily interaction. Although designed to replace language text and to convert some universal emotions through icons, there are no rules governing people how to correctly define the sentiments behind them. Therefore, users with different cultural background may interpret emojis differently. This have often led to misinterpretation and miscommunication from different user groups. This study examines the correlation of the sentiments felt from a group of U.S. users versus a group of Chinese users by having them rate their sentiments from positive to negative for the top 15 most popularly used emojis. The survey was circulated in U.S. and China respectively and received 402 responses. The study weighted the scores of both user groups and analyzed the reasons behind the misalignment, including the structure of the icon, the local culture background etc. It founded that of the 15 emojis tested, over 60% of them had major or minor interpretation differences between the U.S. users and the Chinese users, and only 40% were aligned. The final conclusion was that the sentiment that the user intended to send with an emoji may not be received to the degree that it was intended among U.S. and Chinese users.
Highlights
Emojis first showed up on Japanese cellphones in 1997
The word Emoji in Japanese stands for e = picture, moji = character
In 2010, 625 emoji characters were adopted into Unicode which allowed them to be used in international communication worldwide
Summary
The first emoji was created by Mr Shigetaka Kurita working for NTT DoCoMo’s i-mode mobile Internet platform in 1999. He was inspired by Chinese characters and symbols depicting weather conditions on weather reports. In 2010, 625 emoji characters were adopted into Unicode which allowed them to be used in international communication worldwide. They have expanded to over 3,000 by 2019 that included flags, food, and characters representing different races. Some emojis have been adopted to use in local culture to mean something completely different from its original design. Instagram stated that “[Content] will only be removed from Facebook and Instagram if it contains a sexual emoji alongside an implicit or indirect ask for nude imagery, sex or sexual partners, or sex chat conversations”
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