How college students view emojis

  "Emoji" is a very broad concept, which currently includes at least emoji, emoji, static stickers, GIF animations, etc. (the latter two are collectively referred to as "expression packs").

If we go back to the source, emoji is not a "new thing", including pictorial characters, punctuation marks, infographics and comic techniques, etc. can be regarded as its predecessors, they are all emerging to satisfy the visual instinct of human beings.

This instinct has been unleashed like never before in the age of electronic information, and more and more people have begun to use emojis. Among them, the younger generation who grew up with TV, animation, video games and the Internet is undoubtedly the most active force.

As a young generation of college students, they are very interested in this. In the "Modern Linguistics" class taught by the author, they expressed their opinions through group discussions, classroom presentations and book reports, and even gave birth to a concentration entitled "21st Century Emoji Usage Guidelines". sex seminar.

The topics that college students care about include "form variation of emoji", "functional variation of emoji", "pros and cons of emoji", etc. The following is their reflection record.

Emojis that are deformed or synthesized based on emoji are popular among college students

  Among the various emojis, the most common ones are currently emoji and emoticons.

Sun Shiqi and other students believe that the most common use of college students is emoji, and we have entered the era of emoji from the era of emoji.

Emoji and emoji have different internal logics. People show resistance to the unity of emoji and create a variant between emoji and emoji, that is, emoji that is deformed or synthesized based on emoji. , such as the "infinite" stretched thumbs-up emoji.

  Not only do emoji appear in multiple types, but the same type appears in different styles on different platforms.

Mei Zhiyu and other students investigated the differences between the built-in emoji in Tencent software (such as WeChat and QQ) and the built-in emoji in the input method, and found that more people would use the former rather than the latter.

The functional variation of some emojis is related to the platform. For example, the “smile” emoji with semantic variation is mainly from Tencent software; another example is the “hee hee” emoji that is very cute on Samsung platforms, but not so cute on other platforms.

They dismantled the emoji and found that the composition of the small yellow face expression is "background color + face shape + expression".

  Emojis also exhibit a wide variety of variations in use.

Based on the survey of Bilibili website, Chen Jing and other students found that the most used emojis are "dog head", "knowledge increase", "spicy eyes" and "laugh and cry", among which "dog head saves life" is known as "freedom of life". "Death Gold Medal", which can be used to judge whether the speaker is serious or joking; when people use emoji, they like to use it alone, and occasionally use it together to express strong or complex emotions, but the greater the number of consecutive use, the lower the frequency of use; the emergence of emoji The most frequent position is at the end of the sentence, followed by the beginning of the sentence, and rarely in the sentence, it can clarify the emotion you want to convey or set the tone for the attitude of the whole sentence.

The same emoji with different words may have very different meanings

  Compared with language, the meaning of emoji is more ambiguous, and its use and interpretation are strongly context-dependent.

Wei Zichao and other students found that the same emoji with different words may show far different meanings.

  The meaning of emoji has great flexibility, and because of this, emoji shows infinite variation in function or semantics, including situational variation, such as "smile", "goodbye", "snickering", "baring teeth", etc. The expressions all have usage meanings other than the original meaning. For example, the original meaning of "goodbye" is "goodbye", and the usage meaning is "don't want to pay attention to each other, break up with each other, and make friends"; individual variation, they mentioned that someone once posted a message in the classroom group. "Devil" and "Lightning" in the semester, it was not known until the end of the semester that the former means "smiling" and the latter means "I'm going too"; gender variation, a survey found that women use emoji more than men, respectively 78% and 60%; intergenerational variation, for example, it is difficult for young people to accept the so-called "middle-aged emoticons", and it is also difficult for middle-aged and elderly people to understand the meaning of "sweating" and "coffee", etc.

"The meaning behind emoji" once appeared on Weibo's hot search, which also shows that people are very conscious of the functional variation of emoji.

Emoji will continue to function as part of communicative behavior and may be replaced by other means in the future

  The reason why emoji can "sweep the world" is due to its complement of text, social lubrication and aesthetic satisfaction, but its popularity has also raised concerns.

  There are concerns that variations in emoji will deepen the communicative divide.

Sun Lingyao and other students agreed with this: although the mutation makes the emoji more colorful, there is also the problem of unclear communication intention and easy misunderstanding between the two parties, which may further widen the existing gap between different groups.

There are also concerns that the misuse of emoji can lead to a decline in language skills.

  This view is very popular, and it is exactly the same as the concern about online language, but Zhao Wenxuan and other students are skeptical: emoji make up for the lack of plain text in conveying certain intentions, but instead increase communicative wisdom; emoji are mainly used for Informal occasions do not affect formal occasions too much.

  There are also concerns that the misuse of emoji can degrade sensory abilities.

In their view, only language can express complex thinking and delicate emotions. If language ability degenerates, feeling ability will naturally degrade.

Sun Shiqi and other students expressed certain agreement, because most of the emojis used collage, parody and spoof to blaspheme and distort the things that people have opinions on, and they did not have in-depth analysis and rational understanding of many things. These superficial, Flat, visual emoji ignore human complexity.

  The above is the reflection of college students, and finally I briefly talk about the author's point of view.

The current evaluation of emojis shows a contradiction: while saying that emojis play an important role as a paralanguage, the formula of "100% face-to-face communication = 7% language + 38% expression + 55% body language" is usually cited. It can be described as "high praise"; on the other hand, it is said that emojis are "shallow" and "fragmented" communication, which can only "play" the language.

This ambivalence stems from a narrow view of language.

In fact, we can only give an objective and fair evaluation of emojis if we consider the communication behavior as a whole.

Linguists usually seek a balance between economy and efficiency when explaining language change and variation. This also applies to emojis: from an economic point of view, emojis are concrete and vivid, their forms are concise, and the hardware and software they are based on are increasingly The faster it is, the more user-friendly the user experience will become (for example, the software can automatically recommend emojis based on input characters); from the perspective of efficiency, emojis are playing a more and more important role in greeting functions, teaser functions and social functions. irreplaceable role.

At the moment, emojis do their job well enough to replace other parts of communicative behavior like language, and of course it may not be arrogant.

  Reflecting on emoji in this light, I think the emoji variation is not terrible, people are enjoying it.

In addition, fears that emojis cause a decline in expressiveness and perception may also be overstated, as humans have been using paralanguage or other mediums similar to paralanguage, but never with irreversible serious consequences.

It has been suggested that "we can relax our vigilance about emoji", but I think the reason is not that "a lot of emoji will be preserved and stabilized", but that it will continue to play a role as part of communicative behavior, which may be a response to some of the past methods. may be replaced by other means in the future.

But form is temporary, function is eternal.

(Author: Yang Xu Unit: School of Literature, Wuhan University)