October 29th, 2019 – According to Unicode, the consortium that “regulates” emoji, the “laughing till I cry” face is by far the most frequently used symbol, accounting for 9.9% of all usage.
In second place comes the red heart ❤ with 6.6%, and third is the smiling face with hearts instead of eyes ( 4.2%). Next, at 3.2%, is the “tilted” version of the laugh/cry face – a reinforcer that signifies “I’m laughing so much I’ve fallen over”. This is followed by the simple smiling face ( 2.0%) and the praying hands ( 1.9%).
The theory is that emoji are used to express emotions that can’t be put into words. If that is true, then the worldwide population of smartphone users is singularly lacking in imagination: it uses just six symbols to express 27.8% of its range of emotions. The Unicode standard actually offers 3,178 symbols (“Emoji 12.1”, 10/2019). Indeed, there are so many of them people often don’t really understand what they are supposed to represent, far less signify.
Be that as it may, should we want to monitor the general world mood, the “emojitracker” website (inserire link) provides real-time monitoring of emoji on Twitter. A word of warning: the tracker is not recommended for epileptics, since the constant flow of incoming data could trigger a fit.
Source: Nota Design by James Hansen
