Emoji usage of university students in social media: Comparative analysis of content, habits, trends

Today, the media concept is understood as social media and internet, communication is being tried to be done in this way. With the widespread use of the Internet and social media networks, it has enabled people to have convenience in daily life and to socialize people while giving them separate and independent communication in time and environment. New communication tools allow information to be easily accessed in a wider range of ways and to send information to each other and speed up communication.Social media has been presented as a shift in people's ways of sharing and exploring information, sharing information, exploring and reading, and as a result they have brought a new field that will tell a lot more with a symbol that everyone will understand. With the development of new communication technologies from day to day, the written and oral culture gradually lost their influence and left their place to new emojis. In the early ages, communicating with the pictures drawn on the walls of the cave in order to communicate or to communicate messages to individuals, the emergence of emerging emojis as the new technologies gradually developed and the pace of the day became evermore one of the most important means of communication. The aim of the study is to reflect the attitudes of university students in using social media emoji. The sample of the research is composed of students who were educated at Fırat University and İnönü University in the academic year of 2017-2018. "Social Media Emoji Use Opinion Questionnaire" was used to reflect the opinions of university students about emoji usage in social media and "Social Media Emoji Opinion Opinion Form" prepared by the researcher with expert opinion in order to get detailed information about the questionnaire and social media emoji usage. In the thesis, mixed research design is applied. In the quantitative part of the research, a screening method was used to determine the opinions of university students regarding the use of emoji in social media. In the qualitative part of the research, interview (interview) technique was used to reflect the opinions of university students about emoji use in social media. 100 students selected voluntarily from the students were interviewed through an interview form consisting of open-ended questions. Thus, in social media, detailed information is provided about the conveniences that emoji use in everyday life, emoji usage purposes, the communication effect of emoji usage with social environment, views of emoji to face communication preference and negative aspects of emoji usage. According to the results of the research, it is seen that university students have positive opinions as well as negative opinions about the use of emoji in social media. In general, it was found that university students had more positive aspects of social media than negative aspects of emoji use.