Chat Circles Series talks about graphical communication interfaces. Now more than ever, text is probably the most convenient way to communicate with someone. However, what text messages fail to convey are emotions and feelings, which play a role in everyday human interaction. The researchers then set about building different interfaces, from Chat Circles, Talking in Circles, TeleDirection and Chatscape to address such challenges. Each has their particular set of features to convey how active a user is, log messages, their role in their social group, etc.; all with the goal to make communication between users more transparent. Chat Circles for example generates a circle on the screen when one types; shrinking or increasing in size and assigning them to the respective users.
I think emojis have been a great addition to text communication as they allow users to express themselves more genuinely. Going back through my text conversations there’s not one where I haven’t included an emoji or some sort of gif. I don’t use them as much as some people do but going through my history it seems that about every 4-5 texts. As the paper states, emotions are sometimes lost in a pure-text environment. Not just emojis but now one can add gifs to any text conversation as well, which can more accurately depict how one feels regarding an issue. Gifs are taken from all sources, tv shows, movies, memes, etc. As silly and pointless they may seem to some, I think since they usually reflect humor between two parties well which in turn builds trust. These types of add-ons to text based communication have allowed people to not be constrained to just words when communicating.
Can social sites like FB, Twitter, etc., based off users’ icon history, predict their behavior?
What triggers people to add icons to their text conversations?
