If you’ve been using LOL on your Facebook statuses lately, then apparently that is so last season and it also might be betraying your age or non-coolness. A social media study conducted by Facebook, in response to a New York Times article on e-laughter (yes, apparently, that’s a thing), revealed that a large number of people who laughed while posting preferred to use “haha” or any variant of it, over other forms of digital laughing.
The results of the study are entitled “The Not-So-Universal Language of Laughter) and was conducted in the US and used and analyzed de-intified posts and comments from the last week of May. They categorized the e-laughter into four: the “haha’s”, the “hehe’s”, the emojis and the “lol’s”. The results are also broken down into age, gender, and location. The age part actually disproves some of the arguments made in the NYT article which claimed that “hehe” is actually of the younger generation.
51.4% of the analyzed data showed people preferred using “haha” while 33.7% chose to express their mirth through emojis. 13.1% said “hehe” while only a very small percentage, 1.9% used lol. The piece by Sarah Larson on the New York Times postulates that hehe is actually something “foisted upon us by youth”, the data Facebook collected showed that the younger ones tend to use emojis and a little bit of haha more while older users were drawn to hehe and lol. Haha.
The study also showed that e-laughter varies per location. Ohio and Virginia states are more haha while Florida seems to prefer emojis. Apparently San Francisco hehe and lol are not that popular in most states, including Boston, Chicago, New York. These are interesting facts to know from Facebook. So we’ll probably be more conscious now about the e-laughter we use, just to show that we’re cool and we’re in. Or not. Haha. Insert laughing emojis here.
SOURCE: Facebook
