Newsela News Article

An Emoji is Worth 1000 Words

          Since texting became popular everyone started using symbols to show feelings or emotions. Recently, hundreds of emojis have been created which are small digital pictures or icons used to express ideas or emotions while communicating with others electronically. However, sometimes reading these emojis can be misinterpreted. A Study has been done at University of Minnesota to test why people misinterpret certain emojis. I found my information from Newsela's science news articles, " An emoji is worth a thousand words- and they can all be misinterpreted" by Star Tribune.

          Researchers discovered a few things after they conducted their experiment. Depending on the phone carrier depends on how certain emojis will come up. For example, a person who sends the happy face emoji on an iPhone comes up differently than those who have Samsung phones. Being that the two emojis are different on each phone causes people to misinterpret the emotions of one another leading to miscommunication. Researchers conducted their study by using the top 5 most common used emojis and having a random selection of 304 people between the ages of 15 and 40 rate them positive or negative and describe the emoji. After, doing this they compared the results and found out that depending on the carrier the scale numbers ranged between 2 points and people described them differently from one another. One example is,  when seeing an Apple emoji of a person raising both hands in celebration, people described it as “stop” and “clap.” When describing Google’s version of the same emoji, people used “praise” and “hand.” However, people using the same carrier, who see the same emojis also have different views and emotions towards different emojis. The way people view emojis can tell us a lot about who they are as a person and their views towards certain things. It also shows that each person thinks differently from one another because not everyone is the same. There are going to be more studies on this topic and how emojis relate to people's views.

            I chose to use this article because I, myself, can really relate to this article. Many times I will be texting someone and think they are mad at me because of the type of emoji they use; meanwhile, they were not mad at all. I now know that I am not the only one who is constantly confused while communicating with others through technology. Now that communicating through texting and emailing etc. is the way that the majority of people communicate I believe it is important to know that emojis can be misinterpreted so to be careful the way you use it. I can use this in my future science classroom in several ways. I can use it to show students that everyone thinks differently from each other and that its okay. I can also use this article to show that students need to be precise while explaining findings or research because people can interpret it in different ways and it can have a total different meaning than what you meant. Another way I can use this in my classroom is to show students that science is constantly making new discoveries and one question leads to many other questions, that is why once one experiment is done many others are done after based on the new discovery.

Above shows a video based on how people view different ways of typing.