Read the passage below and check your comprehension by answering the following questions. Then “submit” your work.
Punctuation used to be the key to understanding emotion when we had only written words to go by. Adding a question mark (?) or exclamation point (!) communicated your uncertainty or excitement. A period (.) signaled the end of your thought. Punctuation in today’s digital world does not suffice. Putting a period at the end of your text message can be associated with insincerity (Gunraj et al., 2016), and emoticons and emojis are an expected addition to texts, tweets, and posts. Emoticons are textual portrayals of emotions designed to clarify messages in the absence of nonverbal cues [:-), :-(, ;-)] and are fairly small in number. Emojis are Unicode graphic symbols; these seemingly unlimited icons have filled our online world. From the smiley face to an icon for sarcasm, emojis enrich our nonverbal communication and help us send messages more rich in meaning in both personal and workplace applications (Skovholt, Grønning, & Kankaanranta, 2014). While tongue and wink emoticons can clarify sarcastic intent, for example (Thompson & Filik, 2016), emojis can communicate far more complexity in mobile communications and social media (Kralj Novak et al., 2015) through color, animation, and complexity. There are emojis for sports, celebrations, personal interests, and religions—often animated.
In 2016, Facebook gave its users five more choices in addition to the “like” emoji: love, haha, wow, sad, and angry (Preimesberger, 2016), in an effort to help users clarify intent for their reactions to posts, pictures, or videos on its site. Marketers realize the power of emojis in online advertisements (Hof, 2016) by developing custom emojis for products. The next wave of emojis promises to include odor applications for online text chatting and voice-mail receiving (Xiang et al., 2016). The world of emojis continues to become richer in conveying the nonverbal messages previously absent in written text.