{"id":942,"date":"2015-05-09T15:16:57","date_gmt":"2015-05-09T19:16:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.openbible.info\/blog\/?p=942"},"modified":"2016-01-21T23:15:22","modified_gmt":"2016-01-22T03:15:22","slug":"heralds-of-the-emojipocalypse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.openbible.info\/blog\/2015\/05\/heralds-of-the-emojipocalypse\/","title":{"rendered":"Heralds of the Emojipocalypse"},"content":{"rendered":"

The final slide of my presentation (.pptx<\/a>, .pdf<\/a>) at last weekend’s BibleTech conference half-jokingly argued that 100% of digital Bible notes would contain emoji by the year 2028, up from 1-2% in 2015:<\/p>\n

\"An<\/p>\n

Unknown to me, the previous day, Instagram had published an analysis showing how 40% of Instagram posts contained emoji<\/a> in April 2015. Already they’re well on their way to over 50% of all posts including emoji–some countries (Finland, France) are already there, which in turn means that the emojipocalypse may arrive sooner than expected.<\/p>\n

Instagram’s analysis ascribes consistent meanings to certain emoji. For example, they provide several religion-related meanings for the so-called* “praise the Lord” emoji:<\/p>\n

🙌<\/big>: … #yeslawd, … #stayblessed, … thou<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

“Thou” in particular suggests that people are sharing KJV-based Bible verse pictures with this emoji attached to them.<\/p>\n

The Instagram study, with its high emoji percentages, indicates to me that people use emoji when they’re already primed for images and especially when they’re sharing a photo. This explanation makes a lot of sense to me, and I feel silly for not thinking of it earlier, especially considering that a whole section of my talk discusses how people approach the Bible differently when images are involved. Let’s look at the data:<\/p>\n

Percent of Tweets with Emoji<\/h3>\n\n\n\n\n\n
<\/th>\nBible verses shared on Twitter<\/th>\nLinks to Bible websites on Twitter<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n
<\/th>\nAll tweets<\/th>\nExcluding retweets<\/th>\nAll tweets<\/th>\nExcluding retweets<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n
With image<\/th>\n14.7%<\/td>\n13.3%<\/td>\n24.8%<\/td>\n6.2%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Without image<\/th>\n2.4%<\/td>\n3.0%<\/td>\n2.7%<\/td>\n2.4%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n

There are two datasets here: one tracks all the Bible verses shared on Twitter (for one day only: about 200,000 tweets), and the other tracks links to Bible websites on Twitter (for all of April 2015: about two million tweets). In both datasets we see that people are far more likely to include emoji when their tweet includes an image than when it doesn’t.<\/p>\n

So there you go: emoji usage correlates with image usage, at least on Twitter and at least with Bible verses.<\/p>\n

Separately, the Bible-verse Twitter tracker<\/a> now keeps a daily total of emoji shared with Bible verses.<\/p>\n

* No one actually calls it this.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The final slide of my presentation (.pptx, .pdf) at last weekend’s BibleTech conference half-jokingly argued that 100% of digital Bible notes would contain emoji by the year 2028, up from 1-2% in 2015: Unknown to me, the previous day, Instagram had published an analysis showing how 40% of Instagram posts contained emoji in April 2015. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[27,12],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.openbible.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/942"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.openbible.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.openbible.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.openbible.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.openbible.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=942"}],"version-history":[{"count":28,"href":"https:\/\/www.openbible.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/942\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1092,"href":"https:\/\/www.openbible.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/942\/revisions\/1092"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.openbible.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=942"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.openbible.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=942"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.openbible.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=942"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}