Despite research establishing emojis as sites of critical racial discourse, there is a paucity of literature examining their importance in the increasingly popular context of mobile payments. This is particularly important as new forms of social payment platforms such as Venmo bridge the seamlessness of mobile payments with the vibrant communicative practices of social networks. As such, they provide a unique medium to examine how emojis are used within the context of digital consumption, and by extension, self-representation. This study analyzes approximately 325 million public transactions on the U.S. payment platform Venmo to understand whether emoji usage in mobile payments is more hedonic or utilitarian. We then explore how race is represented across emoji usage on Venmo via tone-modified emojis, a subset of emojis whereby users can choose a skin tone. We found that while emojis in general are used for more hedonic purposes than utilitarian ones, darker tone-modified emojis indicate a proportionately higher use in hedonic consumption as compared to lighter tone-modified emojis, and also show a higher representation of utilitarian categories in transactions. Thematic analysis revealed that subsets with darker tone-modified emojis have a greater lexical variety and engage in more playful uses of emoji in mobile payments

中文翻译：

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理解 emoji 在移动社交支付中的含义：通过修改肤色的 emoji 使用探索移动支付作为享乐与功利的使用

尽管有研究将表情符号确定为批判性种族言论的网站，但很少有文献研究它们在日益流行的移动支付环境中的重要性。这一点尤为重要，因为 Venmo 等新型社交支付平台将移动支付的无缝连接与社交网络充满活力的交流实践联系起来。因此，它们提供了一种独特的媒介来检查表情符号在数字消费环境中的使用方式，进而扩展为自我表现。本研究分析了美国支付平台 Venmo 上的大约 3.25 亿笔公共交易，以了解表情符号在移动支付中的使用是更享乐还是更实用。然后，我们通过音调修饰的表情符号探索了在 Venmo 上表情符号使用中种族是如何表示的，用户可以选择肤色的表情符号子集。我们发现，虽然表情符号通常用于比功利目的更多的享乐目的，但与较浅色调修饰的表情符号相比，深色调修饰的表情符号表明在享乐消费中的使用比例更高，并且在交易中也显示出更高的功利类别代表性. 专题分析显示，带有更深色调修饰的表情符号的子集具有更大的词汇多样性，并且在移动支付中更有趣地使用表情符号