These Survey Results Prove That There are Two Types of People - Emoji Users Edition

According to a recent Tellwut Online Survey there are two types of people in the world - those who use emojis and those who do not. An August 2017 online survey has found that when sending personal e-mails 47% respondents use the small digital images known as emojis and 52% do not. Of the over 2700 that answered, it was discovered that it was not Millennials but Generation X that had the most emoji users when sending personal e-mails, totaling in at more than half with 55%. Millennials follow next with 46% and lastly the majority of baby boomers do not, as only 43% do. The majority of Generation X were on the cusp of adolescence in 1982 when the emoticon, which is the predecessor to the emoji, first came on to the scene via Carnegie Mellon University’s Scott Fahlman. The emoji, which is a Japanese word, was invented in 1999, you can think of an emoji as a more sophisticated of the emoticon. An analogy would be to compare the 1972 Pong video game to Mario Tennis, where an animated ball is going back and forth on a screen where the modern version is more detailed and colourful. The concept of the emoticon was to decipher jokes from serious posts, as with a purely text based correspondence there is no body language or tone of voice to steer the emotional direction of the conversation. The same idea is brought to us with the emoji. Tellwut respondent Spannma01 said, I like using emojis because they express things that we would like to say about how we are feeling at the time. It also sends a message of how the person are feeling when sending the email.” More than half of those polled at 61% said that emojis helped to decipher tone and when broken down between the sexes, 52% of males said it was helpful and that number increases by more than 10% with females as 65% of women said that it enriched their textual conversations. One thing is for certain; amongst all demographics - people do not include emojis when sending work related e-mails, as a whole only 13% of respondents admitted to punctuating their professional correspondence with these expressive mini markers. For the minority of visually expressive individuals out there, your emoji usage could be changing some people’s perception of you. People who use emojis are viewed as less serious by 35% of respondents and more alarmingly, less competent at their job by 31% of those we asked. On the flipside if you use emojis you are more likely to be received as someone who is friendly, warm and even more approachable by 43% of those who were polled.