Facepalm Of The Day
Today’s “Are you serious?” moment comes courtesy of Twitter where rapper K.A.A.N. posted a screenshot of an iPhone text conversation with the caption, “This piece is called old people using the wrong crying emoji.”
Both the texter and the textee in this conversation seem to be selecting the wrong crying emoji; instead of using the sobbing or single tear with frown emoji, they’re clearly using the “crying with laughter” emoji to express their grief over the textee’s mother passing away. We’re guessing that laughter wasn’t exactly what they were trying to convey here…
Interestingly enough, a research lab based out of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota found that people of different demographics have vastly different interpretations of certain emojis. “I think some people thought that they could use emojis with little risk and what we found is that it actually is at high risk of miscommunication,” Hannah Miller, a Ph.D. student at the University of Minnesota and one of the authors of the study, said. For example, the researchers found that when people receive the “crying with laughter” emoji (which Oxford Dictionaries declared its word of the year in 2015), some interpret it positively while others interpret it negatively, which is exactly the case in this text conversation. Just a little food for thought!