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Analysing Emoji Used in Social Media As Signs on the Basis of Peirce Theory of Semiotics Ankur Jyoti Talukdar 1

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Analysing Emoji Used in Social Media As Signs on the Basis of Peirce Theory of Semiotics Ankur Jyoti Talukdar 1 Journal of Xi'an University of Architecture & Technology ISSN No : 1006-7930 Analysing Emoji used in Social Media as Signs on the basis of Peirce theory of Semiotics Ankur Jyoti Talukdar 1 1. Research Scholar, Department of Assamese, Gauhati University Abstract : The Twenty-first century saw a boom in the information-technology sector. Due to this, social media emerged as a new and effective medium of expression. This ‘New Media’ changed lifestyles, ideologies, and even means of communication. Social media communication is not like conventional or face to face conversation; rather it is a virtual one. Social media communication is not like a conventional face-to-face conversation rather a virtual one. Because of its virtual nature, in some cases understanding the real meaning of a text message become challenging and misleading. Emoji nullify this problematic situation to some extent. Emoji convey the emotional side of a message. This paper aims to discuss emojis used in social media from the perspective of semiotics. Specially the idea presented by Charles Sanders Peirce regarding the philosophical study of signs that revolutionized the human approach towards signs. Based on his idea emojis can be viewed from the analytical spectrum and its nature can be understood for fruitful communication. Keywords : Communication, Emoji, Netspeak, Peircian model, Semiotics, Social Media. 1. Introduction As a human being, man are associated with signs from the very beginning. Primitive man might have not known how to use signs as ‘the sign’, but their day to day life is definitely associated with simple signs. With the advancements of human cognitive capacity signs also tend to get complex over the years. Now humans live in a world of signs, from the morning alarm clock to turning off the bed switch, knowingly or unknowingly humans create and decipher signs every day. Talking about the usage of day to day signs, humans can’t ignore language. Swiss linguist Ferdinand Saussure referred to Language as ‘the most important’ of all of the systems of signs (Saussure, 1983, p. 15). Emojis are not a conventional language. But because of their communicative nature some scholars like to call it lingua franca for the digital age (Pardes, 2018). Today thousands of emojis make communication better. But it dates back to the 80s of the twentieth century. Primitive emojis are known as emoticons, which were first suggested by computer scientist Scott Fahlman in September 1982, to the Carnegie Mellon University message board that :-) and :-( could be used online to distinguish emotional elements from serious statements. What we call emoji today was first used in an early mobile internet platform from Japan’s main mobile carrier, DOCOMO in 1990, which were created by Japanese artist Shigetaka Kurita. Kurita was keen to design an attractive interface so that information could be Volume XIII, Issue I, 2021 Page No: 212 Journal of Xi'an University of Architecture & Technology ISSN No : 1006-7930 conveyed in a simple yet effective way. Over the past few years emoji has become an inescapable part of both informal and formal conversation. Showing up in press releases and corporate emails and making it to entry as "Word" of the year in Oxford Dictionaries in 2015, features its growing nature and acceptability by mass people. People are aware of its influential, attractive and user friendly characteristics but might not know that emojis are based on semiotics. Even when Kurita designed emoji he might also not have thought about semiotics, he might not have heard the name of Peirce, but intentionally or unintentionally he created one of the most effective signs of digital media. Today 'semiotics' is an umbrella term which is used to describe both the pillar tradition of Semiotics, one was known as ' semiology ' prescribed by Ferdinand de Saussure and another was known as ' semiotics ' proposed by Charles Sanders Peirce (Chandler, 2007). Saussure was a Swiss linguist and so his idea of semiotics was round around language. In contrast to Saussure, Peirce was an American philosopher, logician and mathematician, so he looked semiotics from a more philosophical perspective. The Peirce model is definitely more diverse and well equipped to reason the signs other than language. Moreover unlike Saussure, Peirce theory of semiotics is a triadic model which can describe signs with multilayered meaning. Emoji stand for something and that something either can have mono or multilayer meaning. That’s why emojis can be labeled as signs as Chandler (2007) points out that we refer to ‘sign’… of anything which ‘stands for something (p.02). Thus emoji as signs encourage academic discussion under semiotics discourse. 2. Literature Review Scholars have been interested in theories of signs that appear throughout the history of philosophy from ancient times onwards. Scholars like Todorov (1982), points out this historical background in his book Theories of the Symbol. It is known that (Romeo, 1977) Saint Augustine or Augustine of Hippo was the first person to introduce a thematic proposal for uniting ‘sign (signum) and ‘symbol’ under the notion of "sign" ( signum ). In his book Basics of Semiotics, Chandler (2007) added the first explicit reference to semiotics as a branch of philosophy appearing in John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). But contemporary semiotics can’t be traced back to the nineteenth century. In his book Course in General Linguistics (1916 ) Ferdinand de Saussure first proposed a dyadic model to describe ‘Semiology’ (semiotics). While Saussure studies the role of signs as part of social life Peirce did a range of studies (semeiotics), which closely related to logic. By defining a sign, Peirce wrote, ‘‘I define a sign as anything which is so, determined by something else, called its Object, and so determines an effect upon a person, which effect I call its interpretant, that the later is thereby immediately determined by the former’’(Peirce, 1931:58). Peirce's thoughts were instrumental for many scholars like Emberto Eco (1976), Charles Morris (1938), Elizabeth W Bruss (1978), in the later years. Inspired by Peirce idea, Ferreira et al. (2000) characterized sign as only a considerable thing when it is interpreted by someone as sign. According to him, if a person can’t interpret something as ‘signifying’, which referring to or standing for something other than itself, surely that can’t be a sign (chandler, 2007). Chandler (2007) also pointed out that people interpret things as signs largely unconsciously and that too because people can relate them to familiar systems of conventions. As Chandler (2007) stated in his book that Signs can take the form of either words, images, sounds, odours, flavours, acts or objects, but such things have no intrinsic meaning and become signs only when we invest them with meaning. Semiotics is only concerned with this meaningful use of signs. Thus emoji can also look with the prism of such. All the academic Volume XIII, Issue I, 2021 Page No: 213 Journal of Xi'an University of Architecture & Technology ISSN No : 1006-7930 discussion around emoji started in the last fifteen years or so. This discussion started with accepting emoji as an added meaning to certain text (Derks et al., 2007; Alshenqeeti, 2016; Thompson and Filik, 2016). Some researchers concluded emoji as an emotional tone to a digital conversation for enhancing social relationships (Riordan, 2017; Danesi, 2016; Kaye et al., 2016). The term ‘Semiotics’ comes under investigation for several times as scholars or researchers like Hamza Alshenqeeti (2016) in his publication Are emojis creating a new or old visual language for new generations ? A socio-semiotic study carefully examines how people with different backgrounds with culture, age, gender or level of experience treat or understand digital graphicons differently. Taking it a further Will Gibson, Pingping Huang and Qianyun Yu (2018) in their paper entitled Emoji and communicative action: The semiotics, sequence and gestural actions of ‘face covering hand’ argued how Conversational Analysis (CA) approach can be a useful tool to the examination of emoji’s communicative purpose. The semiotics of emoji: the rise of visual language in the age of the Internet is one of the prime literatures in this academic discourse. In his book Marcel Danesi (2016) proposed the idea that ‘‘emoji code might well be the universal language that can help solve problems of comprehension that international communications have always involved in the past” (p. vii). Moreover this book made a careful attempt to look at the background of the emergence of emoji stating its roots back to semiotics of Japanese manga cartoons , American counterculture of 1960s, the acid house movement of 1980s/90s and internal marketing campaign of a life insurance company in Massachusetts. Some other publications (Moschini, 2016; Stark and Crawford, 2015) also supported this historical development. Supporting Danesi’s idea on universality of meaning of emoji, Alshenqeeti (2016) remarked that as a part of language form, emojis may be able to bring clarity in cross-cultural communication. On the other hand, this idea is criticized by Kerslake and Wegerif (2016) in their research work. They emphasis on cultural competence by arguing that emoji can only be decoded with cultural competence. And cultural competence is not universal but relative to cultural background. There are some other scholars (Baron, 2004; Lo, 2008; Markman and Oshima, 2007; Nishimura, 2015) who proposed cultural background of Emoji user define the meaning of it. It is clear that scholars aagreed on the role of the interpreter in the process of decoding the meaning. Similarly some of them believed in the rich socio-semiotic history of Emoji, which creates a complex domain of potential meanings (Moschini, 2016). This opens up the discussion scope of Emoji from the perspective of semiotics proper. Neither the Saussurean model nor Peircean model is tested on the academic domain of Emoji study.
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