Now superseded as explicitly monetized objects by other graphics designed for affective interactions, emoji nonetheless represent emotional data of enormous interest to businesses in the digital economy, and continue to act symbolically as signifiers of affective meaning. This article examines emoji as historical, social, and cultural objects, and as examples of skeuomorphism and of technical standardization. Emoji, ubiquitous digital images that can appear in text messages, emails, and social media chat platforms, are rich in social, cultural, and economic significance. This piece examines emoji as conduits for affective labor in the social networks of informational capitalism. Overall, we find significant potential for miscommunication, both for individual emoji renderings and for different emoji renderings across platforms. When considering renderings across platforms, these disagreements only increase. In cases in which participants rated the same emoji rendering, they disagreed on whether the sentiment was positive, neutral, or negative 25% of the time. Both in terms of sentiment and semantics, we analyze the variance in interpretation of the emoji, quantifying which emoji are most (and least) likely to be misinterpreted. Through an online survey, we solicit people's interpretations of a sample of the most popular emoji characters, each rendered for multiple platforms. We explore whether emoji renderings or differences across platforms give rise to diverse interpretations of emoji. Google's Nexus phone), potentially leading to communication errors. Emoji also render differently on different viewing platforms (e.g., Apple's iPhone vs. However, as graphics with nuanced details, emoji may be open to interpretation. Social relationships are seen to play a vital role in the meaning generation process-this process influences how individuals understand and interpret emoji in the social media context of Facebook.Įmoji are commonly used in modern text communication. The results highlight how meaning is generated in a two-directional communication exchange. The proposed conceptual model focuses on the communication process of meaning generation of emoji. The research has identified influences such as culture, religion, the relationship between interactants and other categories in the way emoji are interpreted and applied within the context of the Facebook platform. Data is collected via unstructured online observation and interviews based on the methodological concept of theoretical sampling. Previous research on emoji only focused on Twitter and other, discontinued channels. This research adopts a classic grounded theory methodology which focuses on providing conceptual insight into a specific phenomenon, a substantive area where latent patterns are identified. Developing a deeper understanding of the identified factors-and how, under which circumstances, and why they influence effectiveness-will help to improve CMC in a variety of settings. This research identifies key factors and contextual variables that impact on aspects of meaning-generation and communication effectiveness. However, there has been evidence that emoji can be interpreted in different ways, which in turn leads to a mis-match between the meaning intended by the sender and the meaning interpreted by the receiver.

Emoji refer to picture characters, they come in many forms, from yellow faces to flags and objects, etc. In addition to the meaning of interaction as carried by the text itself, CMC increasingly makes the exchange of non-textual meaning possible-predominantly via emoji. Such developments have required people to increasingly rely on computer-mediated communication (CMC) for social interactions. Communication studies have seen a radical change in focus due to advancements in Information and Communication Technology (ICT), predominantly from the increased use of the Internet.

Confused smiley face for facebook