What We Really Mean When We Text 150 Identical Emoji in a Row

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What We Really Mean When We Text 150 Identical Emoji in a Row

We've always loved repeating ourselves.

Screenshot by the author

A comically long chain of over 150 emoji skulls followed by a short ​shower thought from "Deaths-Head Revisited," a 1961 episode of The Twilight Zone. It's a text I got the other day over group chat with some friends, and it seems to encapsulate something I've been noticing more and more in this golden age of ideograms, where instead of just sending a single emoji we send a string of multiple identical emoji.

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Why do we text 150 repeating skulls? Or a bunch of pizza slices or alien faces? A source for this story, perhaps in jest, responded to an initial Twitter message I'd sent with six thumbs up. Maybe around midnight tonight someone will text you, like, a dozen martini emojis. Is it for emphasis? Is it our knack for taking up space, or plain repeating ourselves? Is just for laffs?

"At first glance, we can look at it as another way of underscoring a point, or emphasizing an emotion," said ​Helen Papagiannis, "similar to using an exclamation mark, or boldface type to accentuate a thought traditionally." Papagiannis, whose research and writing explores the impacts of augmented reality, virtual reality, and wearables on our lives, likens it to all those extras Gs when you type, OMGGGGGG.

But she thinks there's more to it than that. For her, it's about human expression through digital language in a virtual age, a form of cosplay in the digital world.

"We are creative beings. We communicate who we are through fashion, our words, our bodies and I don't think digital communication is any different in this regard," Papagiannis told me. "It's about using the tools that surround us culturally and personalizing our mark. Perhaps it's even a way to humanize technology."

Perhaps it's even a way to humanize technology

Nicole Contaxis, an information studies graduate student at UCLA, thinks repeating emoji is about emphasis too, "primarily for comprehension." But she said that's only if emoji use were subject to the same trends as, say, website design.

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"When people design an interface for public use, they generally assume a low barrier to entry and a low comprehension level," said Contaxis. "Neither of these assumptions are inaccurate. Repetition in these situations helps a wide audience understand the layout and reiterates intent."

"I think repetitive emoji use exists outside of these confines and offers other interpretations than emphasis or anger or silliness," she said, adding that her personal interpretation of repeated emoji use is that repetition drains the original meaning of the emoji, making it that much more susceptible to contextual meaning. Repetition, Contaxis told me, lends itself not just to emphasis, but to gutting meaning as well.

Screenshot by the author

If anything, ideograms, through repetition, can become nonsensical.

Contaxis offered me a personal example: "Repeated use of the French fry emoji for me and certain friends means, 'I love you and I'm thinking of you and I hope you are doing well.' The French fry loses meaning so that the real intent can be understood, but only through repetition. Repeated use of the alien emoji does not have meaning in itself, rather it depends on the larger conversation and relationships."

The same, it seems, for seven of those little spiral things in response to three Easter Island statues, which came in response to three waves. It's another text I received somewhat recently, and is mostly nonsense. But there is a comedic cadence to it that just feels so singular to emoji.

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"Perhaps this understanding of repetition and meaning demonstrates that this kind of emoji use is playful by nature," Contaxis said. "How angry can a person really be if they text you 10 frowny faces in a row? Wouldn't they just use stern and serious language?"

How angry can a person really be if they text you 10 frowny faces in a row?

Maybe it is for laffs, after all. Even then, there are other forces at play, particularly age and geography, that frame the idiosyncrasies of certain repeating emoji. But if that's the case—that we're mainly just having fun when we text repeating emoji—Contaxis said she thinks that playfulness lies in the nature, not the content, of communication precisely because emoji are still so new.

"Playfulness is more embedded in new mediums than in old," she said. "Shakespeare was able to invent new words not simply because of linguistic skill but also because of an openness to newness embodied by new forms and new audiences of the time period. Christopher Marlowe benefited from the same environment but in less well-known ways."

In other words, it is just the beginning. So if ​we should ask if emoji could ever be a language we should also ask what our tendency to repeat ourselves and generally be goofballs might bring too bear on that language. But, we're really still in the dawn of emoji. Things are still fluid. This is is why Contaxis argues that unpacking digital semiotics in the context of personal communication, seemingly the preserve of this sort of emoji repetition, "is difficult if not impossible."

Why do we Forever Emoji? Who knows. Whatever it is, it says a lot more about us than we think. "Emojis are also like our mini avatars," Papagiannis, the AR researcher, said. "They are extensions of us."

Of our skulls, anyway.