Emoting with Pop Culture
When you can’t find the right words, sometimes Beyoncé can help. Or SpongeBob. Or any of the pop culture icons who’ve been turned into GIFs by denizens of the web.
Using search insights from Google’s visual expression search engine, Tenor, we broke down how celebrities are used to convey emotions, feelings, and actions.
Let’s start with Drake. We’ll use GIF search data (e.g., searches for “Drake cry” or “Drake happy”) to understand how people emote with his GIFs. This visualization breaks down how various emotions and actions appear in Drake searches, organized by popularity.
When GIF searches for Drake include an emotion, nearly 1 in 3 of these searches are for “Drake clapping.” In other words, people often communicate enthusiasm or support with Drake GIFs. You can use the dropdown menu to explore other celebrities and emotions or actions most commonly associated with them.
“Clapping” is unique to Drake; other celebrities are wielded to convey different feelings. Here’s a ranking for the K-pop group BTS; “clapping” isn’t even in the top 25:
This depicts the range of feelings, sentiments, and actions in BTS GIFs. Fans most often use BTS GIFs to emote “love,” which is in the top position.
Here’s the same ranking for Elmo, similarly illustrating the wide emotional range represented in GIFs.
In Elmo’s case, the most commonly associated search is for “shrug,” with 19% of searches. The feelings people convey with Elmo run the emotional gamut, from “laugh” to “cry” to “creepy.”
There are other characters and people even more closely associated with “shrug” than Elmo. Here’s a ranked list of celebrities with the largest share of “shrug” searches on Tenor:
Celebrities with the largest share of “Shrug” searches
Kanye has the largest share: over 1 in 4 Kanye GIF searches include “shrug.” After Kanye and Elmo, we also see a number of cultural moments captured in GIF form, such as Michael Jordan’s legendary shrug from the 1992 Finals and Han Solo’s shrug from “Return of the Jedi.”
Let’s look at another classic expression: the eye roll.
Celebrities with the largest share of “Eye Roll” searches
The top celebrity for “eye roll” is Judge Judy, followed by NBA player James Harden, notably due to a moment that received the meme-treatment from an on-court interview.
We can also look at each person’s GIF search data as an emotional spectrum: which celebrity is more likely to be used for communicating happy emotions versus sad?
We’ve charted the ratio of “happy” to “sad” GIF searches for over 100 celebrities. For example, the likelihood of a “happy” GIF search for Beyoncé and Justin Timberlake are over 9 to 1. Conversely, Drake and Stitch are far more melancholy.
Celebrities by ratio of sad to happy GIF searches
Another way to determine the emotional “fingerprint” of a celebrity is mapping their GIF searches on a spectrum, starting at laughing and ending at crying. Ryan Gosling and Cardi B are all giggles, while tear-jerkers Britney Spears and Kris Jenner appear on the far-left of the chart.
Celebrities by ratio of cry to laugh GIF searches
The beauty of using GIFs to emote is that we’re able to harness the expressive ability of an actor or someone’s genuine physical reaction to fill in the gaps left by body language and tone in text-only communication.
So the next time you just can’t find the words to say what you’re feeling, maybe let Michael Scott — or one of the hundreds of other celebrities in our shared GIF vernacular — lend a hand.
This project was in collaboration between the Google News Initiative and Polygraph, a creative studio for data-led storytelling. Charlie Smart, Alberto Cairo, and Matt Daniels contributed to this project.
