IMAGING CONNOTATION OF EMOJIS ON COMMUNICATION AND MESSAGE PERCEPTION

As languages develop they undergo many changes which sometimes persist and sometimes do not. Keeping in mind the scope of these changes and the time they take, emojis are a still a mere blip in the field of communication and this situation is further compounded by the fact that emojis are essentially a part of technology, which is overtaken by better technology almost every day in today‟s world. Whether the increasing shift in favor of textual conversation, and consequently in use of emojis, is depreciative to human communication or not, is perhaps a question of philosophy; this empirical research aims to dissect and analyze the ways in which emojis pervade all our conversations, the way they change the perception of a message and the psychological reasons, and the explanations, behind such changes. The study posited that the use of emojis has not really been adopted by older generations, when compared with young adults. The inference revealed the intent of people behind adding emojis to their text is the intent to clarify or accentuate a message. Intentions, however, do not necessarily translate into effect which is clear from further data. Emojis thus do not clarify or accentuate the message in case of all emotions, which is understandable because humans do not react the same way to every emotion. The study prove that the emojis are used as a whole in the capacity of non-verbal cues, and the lack of them is equated with the lack of their counterparts, thus portraying a person who doesn‟t use emojis as a person who does not betray any facial expressions, body language signs and other affectations that help in message perception. Keywords— Emoji, Online, Disinhibition, Perception, Animoji, Invisibility