The use of emojis by Millennials

Bosch, Oriol J.; Revilla, Melanie

The use of emojis by Millennials

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Citation

Bosch, O, Revilla, M. The use of emojis by Millennials. 2018. handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10230/34961

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Abstract

The use of emojis has been increasing during the last years. Six billion of emojis are used every day. In addition, emojis, which originally were only present on the Internet, started to invade the offline world too. Nowadays, emojis are an essential tool of communication. Since communication is essential in our daily life, it is important to understand how individuals are adapting to the new communication context. Thus, we used data from a survey conducted among Millennials by the online fieldwork company Netquest in Spain and Mexico (n=1,614) to answer some of the main questions regarding the use of emojis. In which contexts millennials use emojis? How many emojis do they use? Why? To express what? Do they interpret them similarly? Overall, results show that Millennials use emojis primarily in dialectical contexts, with a higher use in instant messages. Moreover, they use emojis more frequently with closest or similar age interlocutors. Besides, although emojis are mainly used to communicate emotions, there are clear differences in the interpretation of some emojis. Finally, crosscultural and gender differences appear for this cohort, with Millennials from Mexico using more emojis and women using them to a higher extent to express emotions.