Did you know that, there are total of 3,521 emojis as of September 2020.
And then I came across this little bit on dictionary.com -
The folded hands emoji 🙏 represents an array of abstract and concrete concepts. Some of these are positive like gratitude, spirituality, and hopefulness. It may also be representative of pleading, asking for something, or desiring an outcome. Some users see it as a high-five on certain devices where only the two hands are shown. On other devices, the entire upper half of a person is visible.
As Paul Dole states in “Semiology - A study of signs”, “The hand has significance in India, evoking many associations and many rituals. It forms the basis of greeting with the hands folded: namaste. It communicates states of emotion and mind through gesture: mudras. In cases the hand can offer benediction and protection and instruction. The convention so ingrained of do-not-touch raises the notion of untouchability. The Congress Party which has changed its election symbol several times, has now decided upon the hand—perhaps because of its multiplicity of meanings.”
Which led me to think about how the folded hands emoji is being used in online communications by Indians. So, I searched twitter for the latest 10,000 tweets which used the 🙏 and Hindi (we will call this as HC - for Hindi Cohort) AND another set of 10,000 tweets which used the 🙏 and the user tweeted in English or latinized Hindi (and we will refer to these users as EC - for English Cohort).
Also, keep in mind that this search was done on the day of Eid at 1030hrs.
Few interesting things
The user bio (not the tweets) of those who used 🙏 and tweeted in hindi (HC) often identified themselves with words like “nationalist”, “Jai shri Ram”, “Hindu” among others.
The EC user bios contained a LOT more emojis (for eg. Gamer 🤟🏼👽 #FlyEaglesFly 🦅 #TrapKingzGaming🎮) and languages - English, Tamil, Telegu, Korean (The BTS Army shows up), Indonesian and others. This pretty much broke my text analyser tool. Tried working with dictionaries.
Oh! Also, I discovered that Sonu Sood’s fan club (@FCSonuSood) is legit blue tick verified. I fully expect @twitter to make some changes in the way it awards blue ticks in the future.
But it was proving to be tedious, so I jumped onto do some social network analysis. But not before I did some digging around the content of the tweets which had 🙏.
Below lists the top 30 words from the HC and the next image shows the top 30 from EC.
For those who are aware of Indians and their profound fondness for sending “Good Morning” messages will not find it surprising that a large chunk of messages (from both HC and EC users) was “Good Morning” and “Good Night Messages”. However, there was a big tilt towards religious chanting among HC users. There was also a fair amount of messages targeted at meat eaters and those celebrating Eid. Messages congratulating Giannis for his NBA MVP emanated largely from the native English speaking users rather than Indians.
I also took a closer look at the HC social network. At first glance, it doesn’t tell us much - just indicates that there is a whole bunch of action happening in the middle and then there are bucket loads of conversation happening on the sides.
So, I focussed on the middle - where all the action seemed to be taking place. And sure enough, there was something interesting.
Turns out, that a bunch of people wish CM of Uttar Pradesh “Good Morning” messages.
The top 10 usernames that people reply or mention are - coming at 2nd place is Yogi Adityanath (Chief Minister, Uttar Pradesh), followed by Narendra Modi (Prime Minister, India) at 4th place.
The fact that both Yogi Adityanath and Narendra Modi use twitter as a mode of communication and the fact that the common man has access to the same gives the impression that a person’s good morning wishes maybe seen and noticed. This behavior exhibition is done with twin outcomes in mind - (a) currying favors from those in power and (b) social proofing [idea that we are influenced by what other people see as valuable] their (extremist) view.
I dug a little deeper, and turns out 🙏 is also used to accord respect to somebody in power, especially when it is coupled with a plea for help. (This behavior is seen even among EC users - the tweets are directed at Sonu Sood).
The very core of the HC users using 🙏 is just a chaotic field of greeting reciprocity. The users are mainly from the Hindi heartland, male, hindu and have some # in their handle.
The EC users’ social network again looked a lot like HC users and obviously had more clusters in the middle than HC users.
So removing the surrounding noise and looking at the clusters in the middle revealed something which the text analysis couldn’t (the EC dataset broke the text analyser).
I looked at the top 10 users who the tweets mentioned or were in response to -
Most of the chatter in the middle (the purple and pinks) were about contests and giveaways. 🙏 was used as a prayer rather than a greeting. So I looked at the confusing mix of green and yellow - and Lo! Behold!
There are tonnes of people replying to Eid wishes made by members of the Congress and BJP.
TL;DR
In other interesting things
Highly recommend watching “Tell me who I am” - true story of twins, one of whom loses his memory and the other hides a BIG family secret.
Reading Jordan Rules, it is not a piece of great literature, but those who like Basketball and grew up in the shadow of Michael Jordan would like it.
You should read the story of the Goldman Sachs Analyst who kept his day job AND made his way to pitching for Israel in the Olympics. Talk about time management. This is a story dying to be made into a movie.
For those who like sweet candy pop-corn teenage romance, may I direct you towards “Horimiya”. It is a manga, anime and live-action - all follow the same storyline although with few minor differences.