Why There’s a Sassy Wombat on Your Phone

The Wall Street Journal:

Text messages just don’t convey thoughts and emotions well enough for 2013.

When Tanya Sichynsky wants to tell friends she’s tired, the 19-year-old University of Georgia student doesn’t text anymore. She sends an image from her smartphone of a sleepy cartoon bunny holding a coffee mug with a smiley face.

When Kylin Brown messes up dinner, the 23-year-old Indianapolis work-at-home mother uses her smartphone to send her mother a fingernail-size cartoon of a girl running away from an oven in flames. “We barely use words anymore, except when we talk on the phone,” says Ms. Brown.

…

Stickers play into the human affinity for icons, says Dacher Keltner, a University of California, Berkeley, psychology professor who helped Facebook develop stickers. “We are a super iconic species,” he says. “Textual communication is serial but human communication is parallel.”

Read the whole story: The Wall Street Journal

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