Kappa Kappa Kappa: It’s Three Emojis in a Row!
After we read Sternbergh’s “Smile, You’re Speaking Emoji: The Rapid Evolution of a Wordless Tongue,” I started to think about how and when I feel comfortable using emojis. He talked about the different ways that they are used among friends and how they operate within close relationship (Sternbergh). They’re obviously informal, and I have no problem using them with close friends and family. But sometimes they are used in professional contexts, and it can either be appropriate or completely unprofessional. I feel like whether or not you can just send someone emojis is a kind of intimacy measurement. Like, a really good friend, I can just send a string of emojis in response and that’s totally fine. A friendly professional relationship might mean I can end a sentence with a : ) (never a :P though, noooooope) and I would also not let them shift into emojis, I tend to leave them as emoticons in friendly professional contexts. But it’s not like I would send them the usual string of three emojis that I do with my friends.
I have no idea why I typically send emojis in groups of three when I’m conversing with those I feel close to. It’s a habit I think I picked up on Twitch chats, where you can spam lines and lines of emojis and it’s just part of the expected atmosphere. It makes sense that emojis are common there though—like we read in “Streaming on Twitch,” Twitch acts as a kind of Third Place (Hamilton, Garretson, and Kerne) so it’s both a public place and close-knit community. There are definitely “regulars” and there are accepted methods of interaction. I used to spend a lot of time on the TwitchPlaysPokemon stream, and we would all spam emojis like crazy. Maybe that’s because the chat moved so fast that you couldn’t read the messages, and a single emoji would be hard to notice at the rate the chat window went by. So including several of the same emoji made it easier to see and notice, plus it was participating in a cool moment when it happened. It’s a weird habit, but maybe it was a practical one after all. Well, at least for a Twitch chat going a million miles an hour.
Works Cited
Sternbergh, Adam. "Smile, You're Speaking Emoji: The Rapid Evolution of a Wordless Tongue." New York Magazine. November 16, 2014. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/11/emojis-rapid-evolution.html. Accessed 8 Sept. 2017.
Hamilton, William A., Garretson, Oliver, and Andruid Kerne. “Streaming on Twitch: Fostering Participatory Communities of Play within Live Mixed Media.” Proceedings of the 32nd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI 14, 2014, doi:10.1145/2556288.2557048. Accessed 8 Sept. 2017.