Hands 👋, Face 😷, Space ↔️: The communicative role of emoji in public communication during the COVID-19 pandemic

Description

Communication has played a critical role during the response to and management of the COVID-19 pandemic, and communicators have had a particularly hard task persuading different types of audiences to comply with ever-changing regulations. Local government organisations played a crucial role in recontextualising the national messaging for a local audience and encouraging the public to comply with regulations making best use of the communication affordances of social media communication technologies. Drawing on the latest findings in research on emoji use in social media, this project explores how local government organisations used emoji in their social media communications during the first two critical lockdown periods of the pandemic. Using methods of corpus-assisted discourse analysis we examine the collection of Twitter and Facebook posts collected in collaboration with a number of local city and county councils in the UK. In this talk we describe the role emojis played in these high-stake campaigns, focusing on their intertwining functions of transmitting emotion and attitude (for instance urgency), enhancing message comprehension and recall, and enhancing the engagement of the addressed audiences. The analysis shows that emoji use in social media public health campaigns is complex and strategic, and may serve several intertwining persuasive and communicative purposes. We conclude the talk by reflecting on the feedback from the representatives of the local council organisations and call for greater acknowledgement and awareness of the importance of a more nuanced training of professional communicators regarding the affordances of computer-mediated communication.

Periode	12-jan.-2023
Evenementstitel	Association for Business Communication Regional Conference
Evenementstype	Conference
Locatie	Naples, ItalyToon op kaart
Mate van erkenning	International