Face with Tears of Joy Is Word of the Year: Are Emoji a Sign of Things to Come in Health Care?

Abstract

Oxford Dictionary Word of the Year (WOTY) is not a word but a pictograph, Face with Tears of Joy. For those of you who are not familiar with this pictograph, it is one of the many emoji available for use on your cell phones, tablets, and other devices. In case you missed it, we transitioned from emoticons [;-)] to emoji in the late 1990s.Face with Tears of Joy was chosen as WOTY because it reflected the ethos, mood, and preoccupations of 2015 (Oxford Dictionaries, 2015). Oxford University Press worked with SwiftKey, a mobile technology company, to analyze usage statistics across the world. This emoji was chosen among several competitors because it made up 20 percent of the emoji used in the United Kingdom and 17 percent of those used in the United States.Even the word emoji has tripled in use since it emerged in 1997. You are probably aware of the smiley faces you get on text messages or how your adolescents order pizza at Dominos. To test your knowledge of emoji, visit the Learning Network at the New York Times (http:// learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/08/05/test-yourself-emoji/?_r=0).A BRIEF HISTORYShigetaka Kurita developed the concept of emoji while working for a Japanese company, Docomo, was creating a mobile Internet platform to provide news, weather, email, and reservations. According to Blagdon (2013), The lack of visual cures made the service more difficult to use...and could benefit majorly from some extra characters to show contextual information.I was intrigued by how Kurita viewed the new technology and its impact on communication. According to Kurita, the Japanese traditionally wrote long letters for communication, and the brevity of more casual email sometimes led to miscommunication. Kurita also noticed face-to-face and phone conversations also provided cues to assess mood or feelings. He concluded that the promise of digital communication - being able to stay in closer touch with people - was being offset by this accompanying increase in miscommunication (Blagdon, 2013). Hence, emoji were born as a mechanism to provide contextual information and emotions. Although it took awhile for global acceptance, emoji were eventually adopted into Unicode, a computing industry standard for consistent encoding, representation, and the handling of text expressed in most of the world'swriting systems. Emoji made their international debut in 2011 when they were released on Apple'siOS5.From Blagdon's (2013) article, I was able to link to some interesting websites, for example, Narratives in Emoji (http://narrativesinemoji. tumblr.com/) with Les Miserables. I also found an emoji version of Moby Dick (http://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2013/02/a-whale-of-an-acquisition/) and an emoji zine by Womanzine (http://issuu.com/lindseyweber5/docs/ emoji_by_womanzine).Sternbergh (2014) wrote elasticity of meaning is a large part of the appeal and, perhaps, the genius of emoji. Emoji can express emotion on a small screen in an easy manner, making it easier for those of us who find using our thumbs for text messaging to be a challenge. These seemingly infantile cartoons are instantly recognizable, which makes them understandable even across linguistic barriers.IMPLICATIONS FOR RESEARCH, EDUCATION, AND HEALTH CAREIf emoji are recognizable across boundaries, what are their implications for research, education, and health care? To answer this question, I ventured forward to learn more, beyond my simple use of smiley faces. I discovered a growing use of emoji in marketing, education, and, yes, even health care.A research article (Pavalanathan & Eisenstein, 2015) examines whether emoji will replace ASCII character emoticons. Using a causal inference model, Pavalanathan and Eisenstein compared a treatment group (those using emoji for a specified time) to a control group (those who did not use emoji), with emoticon usage as the dependent variable. They found a statistically significant difference in the use of emoticons, with the treatment group using less and less. …