This week, we went to a Sarah Wiseman’s lecture which was about emoji. The content of this lecture is fresh to me. Because I am from a different cultural background, When I hear that the pizza emoji represents my love, I am undoubtedly confused. Why does pizza represent I love you? For other expression applications, and after Wiseman's lecture, I realized that under different cultural backgrounds, the meme in the online culture is so different.
I also read an article about emoji's use analysis and meaning expression in China. I realized a problem. The article does have an accurate understanding and explanation of emoji's spread and use in China. After several articles related to this kind of search, it was found that the investigation related to this issue did not take into account the age factor. According to the experience of my daily life, even the Chinese from the same cultural background, due to different age groups, the frequency and attention of the network meme will be different, which makes the way of using emoji very different. Take the smile emoji as an example. In the process of communication between me and my peers (who was born in 90’s), Its meaning is indeed as scornful as the article said. But in my parents' age group (who was born in 50’s, 60’s or even 80’s), this expression is just a simple smile and friendly. When I was chatting with my parents using social software, I would like to often receive this expression. I will be shocked at first, and guess if my parents know the true meaning of this expression.
(image from google)
Another example shows that because of different age groups, people would like to have different meme online. The following expressions are initially spread during the chat process of the parents' ages, and are processed by the children (that is, our generation) through the network meme, the same stuff will have an expression of different meanings. This type of expression is rejected by our generation because of the flamboyant color (basically with flowers as the main element) and the outdated artistic word effect. But because we often receive such expressions when chatting with our parents, we naturally use them as a joke, and have no special meaning.
This kind of ‘emoji' usually does not belong to emoji, but it also expresses his own meaning based on a non-verbal environment. What's interesting is that the gif expressions made by such netizens are usually supplemented by textual descriptions to enable the other party to better understand what they mean. In other words, for semantic expression, I don't think that simple emoji is a good choice. After all, the two people who are chatting are separated by a screen, without the expression of body language, without facial expression. We couldn't understand the meaning of each other just by the text.
Referrences:
Chinese People Mean Something Very Different When They Send You a Smiley Emoji — Quartz. p. 5.
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