Research on the Impact of Media Multitasking on Emoticons Usage

Abstract

Media multitasking can be used as the scale to indicate the behavior of digital media. Using multitasking scale can quantify media multitasking capabilities. The study is devoted to analyzing the impact of media multitasking on emoticons usage. Firstly, 400 participants were invited to completed the experiment of media multitasking. According to their numbers, the top 27% of the participants with higher numbers were selected as high-media-multitasking group and the lower 27% of the numbers were selected as low-media-multitasking group. Then, using questionnaires to investigate emoticons usage of the two groups. The results show that media multitasking has a significant impact on emoticons usage. Group with a high number of media multitasking use emoticons more frequently, use emoticons on multiple devices, use more categories of emoticons, and updating emoticons more frequently.