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Individual Statements

Why did we choose this topic? Ask our team!

Authored by Andrew Peacock 🐼

        My current research is founded upon mass communication and media studies, specifically studying how reality is brought into focus and structured greatly by our media outlets and governments. A research keyword of mine is “post-truth”, a term that denotes a so-called era when people believe their emotions and individual opinions rather than the supposed truth-tellers of our society (Oxford 2016). In my research, I posit that we’ve been living in a post-truth world ever since the roots of civilization began to sprout.

        This project is relevant to my studies because it is not only about predicting emojis for people on texting platforms, it is about finding the patterns in and predicting the emotions of mass populations of people. By computing and deblackboxing emotion on a massive scale like this, those who seek to dominate the “true” narrative in any society may have higher-quality information at their disposal in order to do so. The ability to go into a social media platform, or any media that has a free-distribution database, and pull a quantity of posts in order to understand how they feel about any imaginable issue in their community is powerful. It is akin to tapping into our collective subconscious — because most people do not know their content can be directly analyzed or used for research (Fiesler et al. 2018). 

        While research into the social impact of predictive emojis is a young field, it is important that we study how perhaps more authoritarian governments may use this technology to improve their ability to control their citizens. We may firstly do this by studying propaganda techniques in the past, where they succeeded, and where they failed. We would benefit from a fuller understanding of how and why autocratic governments are rising and democratic rights are falling worldwide (Freedom House 2021). As democratic rights have been dwindling across the world for at least fifteen years, it is important that we not only deblackbox new technologies but also deblackbox how they may be used to exploit people and their lives. 

 

References

Authored by Ruhan Hou 🐵

        Communication is ubiquitous in one’s life and determines how one sees the world, how one forms relationships, and how one interacts with other people. Because of its importance, it is frustrating when there are communication misunderstandings, which is the keyword I chose for the 505 class. Culture adds possibilities for causing miscommunication, as cultures from distinctive social norms and understandings. People might experience culture shocks when having intercultural communication. Technology is another way that could affect communication. For example, social media brings convenience to long-distance communication, while providing a veil of one’s identity. The three disciplines intertwine with each other and make the program more intriguing.

        "Communication misunderstandings" could be seen everywhere in the research topic that my group has picked. Emojis have been created as a universal language for people to express their feelings, however, it has appeared not to be the case. For example, in China, the smiley face was supposed to be used to show kindness or happiness. However, nowadays, the younger generation uses it in a sarcastic way. The smiley face has become a “fake smile” and its undersurface meaning has become “a despising, mocking, and even obnoxious attitude” (Huang, 2017). This change has created a huge problem between generations. My mother likes using a smiley face when she texts me. I need to carefully examine her meaning when I see the emoji as I do not know whether she is happy or she is angry with me. I could ask my mother about her meaning to clear out the misunderstanding, but the clarification could not always be done. If other elders send me the emoji, it would be hard for me to ask them to clarify their feelings.

      Various media platforms also add up to the “emoji misinterpretation”. As our technical map and essay show, each media platform has its emojis’ visual appearance in different ways. When users communicate via different platforms, they might experience an unexpected misunderstanding. For example, the emoji “😁” is used as a big smile by an Android user, while it appears as a sarcastic smile on an apple device (Larson, 2021).

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Reference

Authored by Megan Hearst 🦭

        When I first joined the Communication, Culture, and Technology program, I chose the research keyword, “attention” (or ⚠️ in emoji), because I wanted to study how various groups, companies, governments, peers, and the like, were competing for this increasingly scare cognitive resource in the digital age. I was drawn to study emoji because I believe it is yet another weapon in the battle for our attention. These miniscule icons, often rendered in an eye-catching school bus yellow, naturally draw the eye and stand out like a flashing beam of light in a sea of plain text characters—I must admit that even now as I write these words my eyes keep drifting upwards to that irresistible “attention” emoji. This effect would come as no surprise to the original designers of these emojis who designed these icons to be as eye-catching as possible. 

         The attractive design of emojis and their pop culture cache’ has compelled many industries and interest groups to incorporate these icons into their products and publications. Newspapers around the world have incorporated emoji into their social media ledes to compel clicks (​Hågvar 2019). Celebrities like Brittany Spears, Cher, and Andy Murray, are famous for their emoji heavy tweets and Instagram captions, and members of their devoted fanbases create videos and social media posts dedicated to deciphering their pictograms (McShane et al. 2021). Doctors and Public Health official are experimenting with using emoji to get important health messaging across (Boender et al. 2022). In 2014, even the US Government hopped on board, releasing an emoji-laden economic report in the hopes of reaching apathetic millennials (Mosendz 2014).  

         Predictive emoji technology has made it easier than ever to incorporate emoji into our speech. The decision to add emojis to our writing is becoming more automatic and less proactive, as our devices prompt us to add an emoji as an addendum to, or in lieu of, our speech. Eye tracking studies have shown that while the integration of emojis causes people to linger on the icon and the words that surround it for a longer time, it may distract them from taking the time to process and comprehend the whole passage surrounding the emoji (Paggio & Tse 2022). As this feature becomes a de rigueur component of computer mediated communication, we may be sacrificing meaning for the sake of attention. 

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References

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Authored by Xiyue Hu 🎃

          As a product designer, I focus on universal designs so that even people with disabilities can enjoy aesthetic products. In addition, I hope my designs can bring happiness and comfort to everyone. So keyword I choose for my research study is “well-being” because I hope researching different topics related to this keyword would help me understand people’s needs in different areas, including physical objects (hardware) and software. This project leads me to study people’s needs when communicating with others online, which may become an additional area of consideration when designing. 

         Predictive emoji is beneficial for the general public's well-being in the following ways. Emojis in online communication have been widely used because they can help deliver the right feeling, reduce the chance of misunderstanding messages, and make computer-mediated communication more effective. Studies show that face emojis may be a valuable supplemental signal for the sentiment inside text communications with emotion transmission. (Zhang et al. 2021) As for non-face emojis, studies discovered that even they could raise perceived emotion and improve the readability of otherwise unclear material. Some text sentences are confusing when read alone, but the addition of another emoji can assist readers in determining the intended meaning. To make communication easier and reduce the time finding the correct emoji to use, predictive emoji can generate emojis based on the content of the sentence, the structure of the sentence, and the user’s habits of using emojis. Another factor of how predictive emoji improves social well-being is that companies can use emoji databases for sentiment analysis to study the emotional changes of their online users or customers to help adjust their products. 

 

References:

  • Zhang, Y., Wang, M., & Li, Y. (2021). More than playfulness: Emojis in the comments of a WeChat official account. Internet Pragmatics, 4(2), 247-271.

  • Bai, Q., Dan, Q., Mu, Z., & Yang, M. (1AD, January 1). A systematic review of emoji: Current research and future perspectives. Frontiers. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02221/full

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