Social Norms: A Study

No doubt exists that technology has become an incredibly important component of the globalized world we, as people, live in. Technology of all forms is heavily relied on for almost every aspect of people’s daily lives: transportation, entertainment, and especially communication. Talking via technology (whether that be phone calls, email, social media platforms, etc.) has become a social norm throughout the world. According to Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist at Rutgers University who conducted a study on Match.com users, “39% of communication on a regular day is through technology” (Somaiya). These methods of communication become more and more complex and advance each day; one of the biggest technological breakthroughs that have had

You can send emoji to foreigners and understand each other. So it is a new letter system.” (Somaiya). Tyler Schnoebelen, who wrote his Stanford doctorate thesis on emoticons, finding that emoji rules existed that as a society, we do not commonly think about. After analyzing 500,000 tweets, Schnoebelen found that emojis tend to come at the end of messages, act as punctuation, adds to ideas rather than replacing the words, utilize linear time and action in regards to their placement in messages, and follow the “human stance rule” of putting emoji faces before hand emojis in a sentence where both are used. He also commented on emojis and their use in our technologically-oriented society, saying that “We’re try in terms of the cues we get to use to signal exactly what we mean, to give nuance to the meaning…Emoticons and emo provide this nice shorthand.” (Steinmetz). Schnoebelen’s research on emojis support Kurita’s notion of a new letter/language system, and provide further insight on the positive effect emojis have had on

Ben-Ezer created a sculpture titled Shift Key, where she replaced the keys on an old typewriter with emoticons. The old, beaten-down typewriter not only shows how far we have come in technologically when it comes to forms of communication, but also raises questions that complicate this due to emojis as the keys instead of letters: does this new language set us forward as a society, or does it set us back? With the fast-paced life that technology facilitates, are we losing our multi-dimensionality? Do these consequences outweigh the benefits? The endless questions Shift Key creates mimic the uncertainty and ambiguity of communicating through technology, specifically through emojis. Rothenberg’s piece does not address the same questions as Ben-Ezer’s piece, however it shows how dependent we are on emojis as a means of communication. His piece, Emojitracker.com, is a live website shows real-time emoji use on Twitter. Each emoji has its own cell and lights up green when that emoji is incorporated into a new tweet. The chaos experienced by the viewer gives shocking insight into how relevant this language is, how much people depend on a symbol to represent something bigger, and how attached we are as a society to utilizing technology to convey messages and thoughts. Both Ben-Ezer and Rothenberg depict how