By Hailey Mallendick, Senior Staff Writer
Though their hieroglyphic nature suggests cross-cultural understanding, a recent study by GroupLens suggests emojis are causing more confusion than universal communication.
Emojis are small images of characters or objects that were originally created in Japan in 1990, but were popularized by Apple Inc. Since their creation by Apple, they have been adapted for various other smartphone companies like Android, Google and Samsung.
Two percent of tweets and nearly half of text on Instagram contain emoji, according to the GroupLens study on the use of emojis across different smartphone platforms.
Senior Caitlyn Baird is an iPhone user uses emojis frequently.
"I use emojis everyday, my favorite is the 'laughing so hard you cry' face," said Baird.
While many smartphone users communicate with emojis, they can be misinterpreted.
Baird has run into problems before with people misreading her emoji intentions.
"People read too much into emojis, where I just think they're funny," said Baird. "They can read it wrong, especially if you just use a face [emoji] and they aren't sure what it means."
For example, Baird commonly sends out the "grinning face with smiling eyes" emoji to her friends. While she uses it to mean "awkward," others take offense to them since they are not the typical smiley face emojis.
"People aren't sure what that face means," said Baird.
While it's common for people to experience misinterpretations of emojis, it happens even more frequently when sending them from an iPhone to an Android or across a different platform. This changes the view of the emoji on the different users' phones.
GroupLens researchers found that when it comes to interpretation of different emojis, "Forty-one percent of the Unicode characters have a range wider than one sentiment unit, suggesting that at least one platform's rendering of these Unicode characters is different from the other platforms."
They found the "grinning face with smiling eyes" to have the largest range discrepancy across the different phone platforms. Some Android users saw it as a more friendly and positive emoji, while Apple users found it to be rather negative.
Senior Amanda Webb is a Samsung Android user who has found that the emojis appear differently on her phone than on iPhones.
"They always get my emojis, even though they do change a bit," said Webb. "Sometimes they look different from what I wanted, but I don't think anyone has ever been offended."
Aside from testing the sentiments of emojis, the researchers also tested their semantics.
They found that the most commonly understood emoji across all platforms was the "praise hands emoji." Nearly all smartphone users considered it to be a positive emoji.
In an article by NPR on the controversial use of emojis, they interviewed Hannah Miller, a Ph.D. student and one of the researchers from the GroupLens study. In article Miller suggests that smartphone users look up the true meaning of their emojis.
"One thing that could help is a dictionary or in this case is emojipedia.com, the authority on the meaning of emojis," said Miller in the article.
"If that doesn't work, you can stick to old fashioned emoticons :( ."