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Opico: A Study of Emoji-first Communication in a Mobile Social App

Published: 13 May 2019 Publication History

Abstract

In the last two decades, Emoji have become a mainstay of digital communication, allowing ordinary people to convey ideas, concepts, and emotions with just a few Unicode characters. While emoji are most often used to supplement text in digital communication, they comprise a powerful and expressive vocabulary in their own right. In this paper, we study the affordances of “emoji-first” communication, in which sequences of emoji are used to describe concepts without textual accompaniment.
To investigate the properties of emoji-first communication, we built and released Opico, a social media mobile app that allows users to create reactions — sequences of between one and five emoji — and share them with a network of friends. We then leveraged Opico to collect a repository of more than 3700 emoji reactions from more than 1000 registered users, each tied to one of 2441 physical places.
We describe the design and architecture of the Opico app, present a qualitative and quantitative analysis of Opico’s reaction dataset, and discuss the implications of Emoji-first communication for future social platforms.

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    cover image ACM Other conferences
    WWW '19: Companion Proceedings of The 2019 World Wide Web Conference
    May 2019
    1331 pages
    ISBN:9781450366755
    DOI:10.1145/3308560
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 13 May 2019

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    1. emoji
    2. mobile app
    3. social media

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    WWW '19
    WWW '19: The Web Conference
    May 13 - 17, 2019
    San Francisco, USA

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    • (2024)Chirp: The Impact of Private Online Self-Disclosure on Perceived Social SupportProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36869668:CSCW2(1-25)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2024
    • (2024)The Data-Wink Ratio: Emoji Encoder for Generating Semantically-Resonant Unit Charts2024 IEEE VIS Workshop on Data Storytelling in an Era of Generative AI (GEN4DS)10.1109/GEN4DS63889.2024.00005(1-3)Online publication date: 13-Oct-2024
    • (2024)EmojiChat: Toward Designing Emoji-Driven Social Interaction in VR MuseumsInternational Journal of Human–Computer Interaction10.1080/10447318.2024.2387902(1-17)Online publication date: 16-Aug-2024
    • (2024)Syntax in Emoji Sequences on Social Media PostsGood Practices and New Perspectives in Information Systems and Technologies10.1007/978-3-031-60221-4_10(97-107)Online publication date: 13-May-2024
    • (2023)Effective Emoticon Suggestion Technique Based on Active Emotional Input Using Facial Expressions and Heart Rate SignalsSensors10.3390/s2309446023:9(4460)Online publication date: 3-May-2023
    • (2023)الإيموجي وأثرها في اكتساب اللغة الثانية وتعزيزهاJournal of Tikrit University for Humanities10.25130/jtuh.30.3.1.2023.1730:3, 1(344-367)Online publication date: 23-Mar-2023
    • (2022)ARcall: Real-Time AR Communication using Smartphones and SmartglassesProceedings of the Augmented Humans International Conference 202210.1145/3519391.3519398(46-57)Online publication date: 13-Mar-2022
    • (2022)Interpolating Happiness: Understanding the Intensity Gradations of Face Emojis Across CulturesProceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3491102.3517661(1-17)Online publication date: 29-Apr-2022
    • (2022)“I need to be professional until my new team uses emoji, GIFs, or memes first’’: New Collaborators’ Perspectives on Using Non-Textual Communication in Virtual WorkspacesProceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3491102.3517514(1-13)Online publication date: 29-Apr-2022
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