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More than playfulness: Emojis in the comments of a WeChat official account

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This study aims to uncover the complexity of emoji usage on Chinese social media. We investigate emoji usage in comments on push notifications from the WeChat official account of Guokr , which was chosen as a representative for an open forum for public communication. The data includes 2552 comments from 90 articles pushed by the account. The analysis adopts a discourse-pragmatic perspective within the framework of intercultural pragmatics ( Kecskes 2014 ), taking into account both the local discourse environment and the cultural context. It is found that Chinese WeChat users show a preference for using emojis that are unique to the WeChat platform. Qualitative analyses were carried out on selected WeChat emojis used in comments fulfilling the speech acts of self-disclosure, self-praise, humor and complaining. Emojis are found to be used to perform and reinforce a sense of playfulness in social media, but underlying this playfulness there is a discursive conformity to social norms in real life. The use of emojis resolves the tension between the openness and freedom in social media and the conservative, constraint-bounded nature of established social norms.
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      
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            
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ip.00048.zha |Published online: 24 March 2020
Internet Pragmatics issn 2542-3851 |eissn 2542-386x © John Benjamins Publishing Company
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            
            
           

            
              
            
                
            
         
            
 
           
          
          
            
           
            

         
          
            
             

 See https://languages.oup.com/word-of-the-year/2016/ (accessed 12 March 2019).
       
 
 
        
           
         
       WeChat   
      Sina Weibo   
Youku     Zhihu    
Douban            
           

            
           
       Sina Weibo   
           
         
           
            
           
           
           
            
Renren           
 Facebook 
          
          
          
            
         
           
            
          
           
           
           

 
 
               
  how            
         Twitter    
            
             
           
           

  why          
          
 Twitter         
              
         
          
          
            Facebook 
         
          
             
           
            
           
          
          
           
          WhatsApp 
          
           
       WhatsApp    
            
          
            
           
            
              

       
 
     微信 wēixìn     
             
           
             
               
  
          
             
            
        
           
            
          
         

             
             
                
                
            

              
               
           
            
             
              
            
              
  
           
       
           
         
          
             
          
 
          

  

       
  
 
           
 Guokr
 
   Guokr 果壳 guǒké      
            
    Guokr       
         
       Guokr     
             
 e WeChat Communication Index is an index revealing the popularity of a WeChat ocial
account: the higher the WCI, the more popular the account is on the WeChat platform.
 See http://www.gsdata.cn/rank/wxrank?type=month (accessed 30 January 2018).
 
             

            
           
            
           
     Guokr      

 
           
              
            
             
           
            
              
         
            
             
             
           
         

         
          
           
            
         
          
        
         
         
           
         
             
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              
           
         
          
         
           

          
          
             
            
         
          
             
             
          
          
           
            
 
           
           
           
          
         
          represen-
tative or assertive       directive    
  commissive      expressive 
       declarative     
          
              
        

            
             
            
              
          
            

 
 
 
               
            
            

             
           Facepalm 
Slightly Smiling Face    Face with Tears of Joy     
            
             
           
            
 
  
  
  
N
   
 
   
 
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
 
   
              
     Facepalm   Smirking Face   Frown-
ing Face   Heyha    Clever Face      
       
            
          
          

 
            
        
          
        
           
              
            
           

 Use of emojis in self-disclosure
           
           
          
         
            
             
           
            
 Instagram 
        
 Just managed to drag myself back from the brink of suicide. Still deeply
depressed.         I wasn’t
feeling well today, so I went to see a doctor for more anti-depressants  
    Guokr    The moment I got back
and I saw this recommended article from Guokr…      
          
            
         
 http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/life/2016-11/23/content_27458498.htm (accessed 2 April
2019).
 
 
之前好不容易从试图自杀缓解
到中重度之间,今天感觉情况
不怎么好,又跑去医院抓药,
回来就看到果壳这篇推送
默在朋友圈发一个黑白的天空
讲真,抑郁症这玩意
儿能根除不???


 

  
 

   
      Seriously, can depression be cured
once and for all?
          
          
           
           
           
              
           
          
             
             
           
             
            

            
           
            
          
       
               
            
 Use of emojis in self-praise
        
          
           
  
 
这不是普莱特嘛~他的科普书
《坏天文学》中文版是我翻的,
已经交稿,希望能尽快出来
 Bad
Astronomy 

   
             
           
         Isn’t this man
Plait           
        Bad Astronomy His popu-
lar science book Bad Astronomy was translated into Chinese by me.    
          
           
         
             
 
          
           
            
            
         

 
             
           
         
          
              
             
           
              
            

 Use of emojis in humor
          
          
           
           
         

            
        
       多普勒 duōpǔlè 
         开普勒
kāipǔlè   pule 普勒       
            
            

 
他跟开普勒是兄弟吗? 对不
起,这两位我分不清
 

  
      “Is he a brother of Johannes Kepler?”
           
       
            
          Sorry, I cannot tell
one from the other          

            
             
       sorry   
         
              
           
   
 
还是杀程序员祭天更靠谱


  
              
            
 Aer all, it makes more sense to practice human sacrice using a pro-
grammer           
 
             
         
          
          
          
             
               
          
            
         修复了闪退的 
 https://www.douban.com/group/topic/106633759/ (accessed 26 March 2019).
 
还杀了一个程序员祭天         
             

          
           
             
            
            
          
            

Use of emoji sequence in complaining
            
              
            
  
          
            
           
           
          
           
            
            
                
 
 
大伙的重点是年的女
博士而不是什么滴血验
癌吧!



  
 https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/IiQm3Gtg9zbGHaeXDvaA6A (accessed 26 March 2019).
       
          
           
          
            
            
            
           

           
             
             
            
             
          Am I the only per-
son to focus on the fact that she was born aer 1995 and yet she is a PhD holder?”
              
             
            
            
          
          
            

            
           
          
           
          
           
           
            
  
          
             
            
        
             
            
              

 
         
           
              
              
             

 
           
            
           
        
             
               
           
             
          
           
  
           
        
             
            
           
          
            
          

            
           
             
             
             
            
              
             
            
           
       
              
            
             

 
         
            
           
            
          
              

           
            
         
         
             
             
         Guokr    
              
           科技有意思
kējì yǒuyìsi           
           
            
           
           
           
         
             
            
           
             
          
               

 

              

              


              

   
     

   
     

   

 
Discourse, Context & Media  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcm.2018.07.001
  How to Do Things with Words  

   Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts
 
   
Media Psychology 
https://doi.org/10.1080/15213260709336804
   
 
 IEEE Transactions on Multimedia 
https://doi.org/10.1109/TMM.2018.2862363
  Playful Disruption of Digital Media  
https://doi.org/10.1007/9789811018916
       
     
Journal
of Community & Applied Social Psychology https://doi.org/10.1002/casp.2291
 
China Media Research 

  
Langauge@Internet   
 
      
  Intercultural Pragmatics 
 https://doi.org/10.1515/iprg.2011.012
 System 
https://doi.org/10.1016/S0346251X(00)000154
  
 
    

 
 https://doi.org/10.1145/2935334.2935370
 
Internet Pragmatics: Theory and Practice  
  
  The Semiotics of Emoji: The Rise of Visual Language in the Age of the
Internet  
 The Social Media Reader
  
  Discursive Self in Microblogging: Speech Acts, Stories and Self-praise
  https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.260
 
First Mondy  
  https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v23i9.9391
  What Chinese Want: Culture Communism, and China’s Modern
Consumer  
   

Discourse, Context & Media  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcm.2018.04.006
 European Journal
of Tourism Research 
  
 Advances in Social Media for Travel, Tourism and Hospitality:
New Perspectives, Practice and Case  
 
  
Journal of Marketing Management 
https://doi.org/10.1080/0267257X.2018.1483960
 
  
First Monday  
 https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v23i11.9413
   
Discourse, Context &
Media  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcm.2018.05.005
  Meaning and Humour  
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511791536
   Speech Acts, Mind, and Social Reality:
Discussions with John R. Searle  
 Social Semiotics 
https://doi.org/10.1080/10350330.2017.1303020
 Journal of Pragmatics 
 https://doi.org/10.1016/03782166(90)90082O
   An Introduction to Functional Grammar   

  
 Designing for Virtual Communities in the Service of Learning
    
 https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511805080.016
     
  Analyzing Digital Discourse: New Insights
and Future Directions     
  
   
The Handbook of Discourse Analysis  
  
  
 Proceedings of the Fiieth Hawaii International
Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-50)  
https://doi.org/10.24251/HICSS.2017.264
  
Communication Research and
Practice https://doi.org/10.1080/22041451.2016.1155332
   The American Journal
of Sociology  https://doi.org/10.1086/228588
  
Food
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       
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   Proceedings of the
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 https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/W162610
 
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 Companion Proceedings of The 2019 World Wide Web Conference
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Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication
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    
PLOS ONE 
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
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  Chinese Journal of Communication
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     
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  
Knowledge Management & E-Learning: An International Journal 
       
   

International Journal of Strategic Communication 
https://doi.org/10.1080/1553118X.2014.886251
 
 The
Routledge International Handbook of Learning with Technology in Early Childhood
    
https://doi.org/10.4324/97813151430408
  
Language and
Education https://doi.org/10.1080/09500782.2019.1656738
   
 Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on
Human Factors in Computing Systems  
https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025800

 



  



            
           
         

              
          

                

 
... Meanwhile, emojis can fulfill a variety of speech acts such as apologies, inquiries, invitations, rejections, and repair, 'acting on' the pragmatic force of verbal texts and 'acting as' linguistic acts (Herring & Ge-Stadnyk, in press). Additionally, emojis can be used for rapport management (Sampietro, 2019) or discursive representation of traditional norms in social media (Zhang et al., 2021), which used to be fulfilled by certain linguistic elements. The above-mentioned qualitative studies about emoji functions mainly draw upon theories and perspectives from linguistics such as pragmatics (e.g. ...
... Step 5: Functions were subsequently evaluated by tallying and contrasting the frequency of emojis associated with each function, enabling the identification of functions that were universally represented by each one of them. This procedure replicates Zhang et al's (2020) study which examined the use of emojis in the comments section of the official Guokr account on the WeChat platform. ...
Article
Full-text available
Online chatting lacks live physical non-verbal interaction, causing communication difficulties and conflicts. Emojis (emoticons), a visual language that simulates non-verbal cues, are gaining popularity among young people, particularly Chinese students. However, few studies have used WeChat data to study their pragmatic functions. This study employs a qualitative research design, by drawing on chat-logs from 20 Chinese undergraduate students aged between 20-25 years old. Six pragmatic functions of emojis are found to be principally operative, namely attitude/ emotion signalling, speech act emotion signalling, attitude/emotion intensity enhancement, illocutionary force modification, joking, and irony. This study sheds light on the profile of the users of emojis, while aiding the identification of the intended meaning of the sender.
... For example, there are sets of emoji for emotions , people , animals , food , flags , objects , symbols , etc., and new sets are released each year [4]. While emoji are often viewed as fun and playful [33], the significance of their role within current communication should not be underestimated [57]. ...
Article
Full-text available
Emoji are a popular, expressive form of non-verbal communication. However, people often use emoji in ways that result in confusing or cumbersome screen reader output. We created two accessibility support designs: (1) PREVIEW, which displays a basic text transcript of a message with emoji that a screen reader would narrate, and (2) ALERT, which summarises potential accessibility issues caused by emoji within a message. We explored our designs using an online survey and provided participants with the option to edit messages that contained emoji, should they choose to do so. We collected 1508 modified messages from 116 sighted participants and conducted a qualitative analysis of the data to identify the strategies participants used when asked to edit a message for accessibility issues and their appreciation of each design. We found that participants preferred the PREVIEW design over ALERT since it allows for subjective interpretations of what constitutes an accessible message. We report sighted users' rewriting strategies (e.g., editing the message to move the emoji to the end) and incorrect assumptions about screen readers that would lead to using textual markers that are incompatible with screen readers. We discuss the design implications for future systems for accessible messaging.
... Thus we are currently witnessing an increased 'demand for customizable glyphs' such as digital stickers (Loomis et al., 2016, p. 2). Graphicons tend to be non-standardised since they are usually either platform specific (Zhang, Wang, & Li, 2021) or ...
Chapter
This chapter explores how emoji can function as a resource operating in the service of ambient affiliation, which unlike the dialogic affiliation explored in the previous chapter, does not rely on direct interaction. The chapter analyses the role of emoji in finessing and promoting the social bonds that are tabled to ambient audiences in social media posts. It also investigates their role in calling together, or convoking, ambient communities to align around shared values or alternatively contest those values. A specialised corpus of tweets about the NSW state government’s COVID-19 pandemic response in Australia is used to show how emoji both interact with their co-text as well as support the tabling of bonds to potential audiences or interactants. The analysis reveals how emoji tended to both buttress and boost negative judgement by adding additional layers of negative assessment as well as to muster communities around the critical bonds which they had helped to enact.
... Thus we are currently witnessing an increased 'demand for customizable glyphs' such as digital stickers (Loomis et al., 2016, p. 2). Graphicons tend to be non-standardised since they are usually either platform specific (Zhang, Wang, & Li, 2021) or ...
Chapter
This chapter describes the ways in which emoji and language synchronise to realise textual meaning in a social media post. It organises these as features of a system network that describes this sychronicity. A primary distinction is made between instances where emoji replace linguistic co-text (inset) and instances where emoji accompany the linguistic co-text (punctuate) in a manner similar to punctuation or discourse markers. In terms of language, the key discourse semantic systems involved are identification and periodicity, which are crucial in tracking participants and organising information flow in texts. In terms of the SFL model of textual meaning, emoji appear to occupy a wavelength between clauses and higher-level periodicity, while the unique affordances of emoji also provide new opportunities for creating meaning in texts.
... Thus we are currently witnessing an increased 'demand for customizable glyphs' such as digital stickers (Loomis et al., 2016, p. 2). Graphicons tend to be non-standardised since they are usually either platform specific (Zhang, Wang, & Li, 2021) or ...
Chapter
This chapter explores the ideational function of emoji as they concur with language to construe experience as items and activities in social media posts. The chapter details a system network for modelling ideational concurrence. This network defines two main kinds of relations: depiction and embellishment. Depiction is where emoji congruently illustrate their co-text or integrate themselves into the ideational structure of the post. Embellishment, on the other hand, is where emoji make less congruent meanings by either metaphorising through figurative meanings or emblematising through symbols that activate preconfigured meanings for particular communities. The chapter draws on the discourse semantic system of ideation introduced in Chapter 3 to understand the concurrence of emoji and linguistic sequences, figures, and elements.
Article
Observers of the Chinese political landscape have noted significant changes with the widespread adoption of the internet. Existing studies on the internet and contentious politics in China often fall into same old tunes like “authoritarianism vs. liberal democracy” and “liberation vs. control.” This reflection reviews selected work on the internet and politics in China and beyond, proposing a more sophisticated and critical examination through (a) a temporal dimension to pinpoint changes introduced by the internet’s adoption, (b) a mundane dimension that recognizes (contentious) politics in broader life contexts, and (c) a cross-demographical dimension that acknowledges the internet’s role as diverse and complex. The three proposals serve as a crucial first step toward achieving more sophisticated explanations and a deeper understanding of the internet in China for Chinese internet scholars in the coming decade.
Article
The present study examined the pragmatic functions of graphicons used in six different WhatsApp communities created by and for school parents, written in Mexican Spanish, which had the purpose of sharing information relating to daily classroom concerns. A total of 4,824 WhatsApp messages written by these 143 school parents were analyzed using the taxonomy proposed by Herring and Dainas (2017, Nice picture comment! Graphicons in Facebook comment threads. In: Proceedings of the Fifthieth Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. IEEE Press, pp. 2185–2194. http://hdl.handle.net/10125/41419 ). The findings revealed that emoji were the most common graphical device used and they were always visually connected to the verbal content of the speech acts they accompanied. Another result showed that photos were the second most preferred multimodal. These photos were impersonal and as well as emoji, they fulfilled requested tasks as this was a task-oriented group. The findings further suggested that the low frequency of the occurrence of stickers, videos, and GIFS was probably due to the particularities of this community of practice. Thus, the use of emoji and graphicons were constrained by the requested tasks of these communities.
Article
This paper analyses Danish Tinder chats that in the very first message after ‘matching’ immediately launch the prospect of meeting. A collection of 41 threads is analyzed using Goffman’s ( 1967 , 1974 ) concepts of face and interactional framing, outlining methods participants use to open a chat after having matched and addressing the interest and purpose they have approached in the other party. Methods include, in particular, inferences that can be made based on the type of activity or setting suggested for a future meeting, indirectness and ambiguity related to how the social actions are designed, and the conversational cues used such as emojis and enthusiasm markers. The analysis also shows how participants work out and negotiate whether they have a common interest in meeting, in particular, how they exploit and deal with ambiguities used extensively as a mechanism for flirting. The analysis further suggests that practices adhere to gender-stereotypes showing how participants may handle and orient to a norm that women should not agree to meet with a stranger early on in a chat correspondence.
Chapter
This is a collection of contributed, previously unpublished essays on topics in interlanguage pragmatics. ‘Pragmatics’ refers to speakers’ intended meaning, and ‘interlanguage’ is the term used to describe the linguistic knowledge of how non-native speakers (and listeners) use their deficient communicative competence in order to cope with a variety of communicative tasks. In this volume, sixteen distinguished linguists will focus on these central issues in interlanguage pragmatics: (1) non-native language users’ consciousness of their pragmatic knowledge (metapragmatic awareness), (2) their conversational behaviour in interaction with native speakers, particularly with regard to social appropriateness, topic effects, and responding acts, and (3) interlanguage realization of complaints, apologies, and thanks. The structure of conscious linguistic knowledge has become an important issue in second language acquisition research, but has received almost no attention in pragmatics. This volume will be the first comprehensive study of this important linguistic area.
Chapter
This chapter describes the methods and the overall findings of the Understanding Emoji Survey, which we administered online in early 2018 to determine how social media users interpret the pragmatic functions of popular emoji types in the discourse context of comments posted to public Facebook groups. The findings generally validate Herring and Dainas’s (2017) taxonomy of graphicon functions for emoji, although survey respondents (n=523) overwhelmingly preferred one function, tone modification, over the others. Moreover, preferred interpretations of pragmatic function varied according to emoji type. Based on these findings, we argue for the importance of analyzing emoji meaning from the perspective of pragmatics.
Book
This volume examines the language of microblogs drawing on the example of a group of eleven users who are united by their interest in ballet as a physical activity and an art form. The book reports on a three and a half year study which complemented a 20,000 word corpus of tweets with semi-structured interviews and participant observation. It deals with two main questions: how users exploit the linguistic resources at their disposal to build a certain identity, and how the community boundaries are performed discursively. The focus is on the speech acts of self-praise and complaint, and on the storytelling practices of microbloggers. The comprehensive treatment of the speech act theory and the social psychological approaches to self-disclosure provides a stepping stone to the analysis of identity work, for which the users draw on two distinctive interpretive repertoires – affiliative and self-promoting.
Book
This book presents an analysis of internet memes , the linguistic, image, audio, and video texts created, circulated, and transformed by countless cultural participants across vast networks and collectives. They can be widely shared catchphrases, auto-tuned songs, manipulated stock photos, or recordings of physical performances. They’re used to make jokes, argue points, and connect friends. As these texts have become increasingly prominent and prolific, the logics underscoring them—multimodality, reappropriation, resonance, collectivism, and spread—have become lynchpins of mediated participation. Even as individual internet memes rise and fall, the contemporary media ecology persists in being memetic. In this ecology, vibrant collective conversations occur across constellations of mediated commentary, remix, and play. Through memetic media, everyday members of the public can contribute their small strands of expression to the vast cultural tapestry. This book assesses the relationship between those small strands and that vast tapestry, exploring the good, the bad, and the in-between of collective conversation. Memetic media are used to connect participants across distance and context, but they’re also used to dehumanize others through the dominant perspectives they normalize. They’re used to express beyond narrow gatekeeping systems, but they’re still embedded in wider culture industries. Memetic media bring with them a mix of new potentials and old tensions, woven into the cultural tapestry by countless contributors. This book charts that intertwine.
Book
This book starts with the proposition that digital media invite play and indeed need to be played by their everyday users. Play is probably one of the most visible and powerful ways to appropriate the digital world. The diverse, emerging practices of digital media appear to be essentially playful: Users are involved and active, produce form and content, spread, exchange and consume it, take risks, are conscious of their own goals and the possibilities of achieving them, are skilled and know how to acquire more skills. They share a perspective of can-do, a curiosity of what happens next? Play can be observed in social, economic, political, artistic, educational and criminal contexts and endeavours. It is employed as a (counter) strategy, for tacit or open resistance, as a method and productive practice, and something people do for fun. The book aims to define a particular contemporary attitude, a playful approach to media. It identifies some common ground and key principles in this novel terrain. Instead of looking at play and how it branches into different disciplines like business and education, the phenomenon of play in digital media is approached unconstrained by disciplinary boundaries. The contributions in this book provide a glimpse of a playful technological revolution that is a joyful celebration of possibilities that new media afford. This book is not a practical guide on how to hack a system or to pirate music, but provides critical insights into the unintended, artistic, fun, subversive, and sometimes dodgy applications of digital media. Contributions from Chris Crawford, Mathias Fuchs, Rilla Khaled, Sybille Lammes, Eva and Franco Mattes, Florian 'Floyd' Mueller, Michael Nitsche, Julian Oliver, and others cover and address topics such as reflective game design, identity and people's engagement in online media, conflicts and challenging opportunities for play, playing with cartographical interfaces, player-emergent production practices, the re-purposing of data, game creation as an educational approach, the ludification of society, the creation of meaning within and without play, the internalisation and subversion of roles through play, and the boundaries of play.
Article
In this paper, we present a research approach that makes visible how young children in Chinese immigrant families muster their multilingual, multimodal and multisemiotic repertoires as they interact with distant family and friends on social media. The approach brings multimodal social semiotics into conversation with translanguaging to problematize the notion of languages as bounded systems, and to illustrate how emergent multilingual learners deploy their knowledge of the features of different language scripts and modalities to maximise their communicative capacity. We focus on the emergent translanguaging practices of Chinese immigrant children when using WeChat—a popular Chinese social media that is widely used by young families in their everyday language and literacy practices. Reporting on a study of nine immigrant families in southeast London, we home in on one boy aged eight years and his younger brother aged six years, with mixed Chinese (mother) and Portuguese (father) immigrant heritage. Through fine-grained multimodal analysis of online exchanges between the older brother and contacts in their mother’s WeChat network, we illustrate the multimodal, translinguistic and polyadic nature of his language use in practice and reflect briefly on the disjuncture between his home uses of multiple languages and his schooling. We also consider how the younger brother is socialised into translanguaging practices by observing and occasionally participating in his older sibling’s online chat. The findings address a gap in research knowledge by illustrating how social media can enrich opportunities for young children’s emergent translanguaging practices and heritage language learning.
Book
Cambridge Core - Media, Mass Communication - The Emoji Revolution - by Philip Seargeant
Article
Emoji have emerged as a significant feature of modern discourse through the proliferation of social media. Noted for their ability to create meaning across linguistic boundaries, emoji are strongly associated with informal interaction where they serve to build and maintain social bonds. Following in the footsteps of Zappavigna (2011, 2015, 2018) I use a social semiotic approach to analyze how the celebrity, Cher, creates meaning across the strata of discourse and builds affinity with her followers through the use of the toilet emoji in relation to Donald Trump. The approach is successful at elucidating the complex layers of meaning which a single emoji can enact, providing further evidence of the value of the social semiotic approach in the context of global media. The affinity that is created by the toilet emoji can be understood through attitude-ideation couplings, where the coupling is made more 'bondable' to her ambient audience through the system of promotion. The possibility of an emoji enacting both attitude and ideation in a coupling is suggested and implications for how we understand certain semiotic choices discussed.
Conference Paper
Emojis have quickly become a universal language that is used by worldwide users, for everyday tasks, across language barriers, and in different apps and platforms. The prevalence of emojis has quickly attracted great attentions from various research communities such as natural language processing, Web mining, ubiquitous computing, and human-computer interaction, as well as other disciplines including social science, arts, psychology, and linguistics. This talk summarizes the recent efforts made by my research group and our collaborators on analyzing large-scale emoji data. The usage of emojis by worldwide users presents interesting commonality as well as divergence. In our analysis of emoji usage by millions of smartphone users in 212 countries, we show that the different preferences and usage of emojis provide rich signals for understanding the cultural differences of Internet users, which correlate with the Hofstede’s cultural dimensions [4]. Emojis play different roles when used alongside text. Through jointly learning the embeddings and topological structures of words and emojis, we reveal that emojis present both complementary and supplementary relations to words. Based on the structural properties of emojis in the semantic spaces, we are able to untangle several factors behind the popularity of emojis [1]. This talk also highlights the utility of emojis. In general, emojis have been used by Internet users as text supplements to describe objects and situations, express sentiments, or express humor and sarcasm; they are also used as communication tools to attract attention, adjust tones, or establish personal relationships. The benefit of using emojis goes beyond these intentions. In particular, we show that including emojis in the description of an issue report on GitHub results in the issue being responded to by more users and resolved sooner. Large-scale emoji data can also be utilized by AI systems to improve the quality of Web mining services. In particular, a smart machine learning system can infer the latent topics, sentiments, and even demographic information of users based on how they use emojis online. Our analysis reveals a considerable difference between female and male users of emojis, which is big enough for a machine learning algorithm to accurately predict the gender of a user. In Web services that are customized for gender groups, gender inference models built upon emojis can complement those based on text or behavioral traces with fewer privacy concerns [2]. Emojis can be also used as an instrument to bridge Web mining tasks across language barriers, especially to transfer sentiment knowledge from a language with rich training labels (e.g., English) to languages that have been difficult for advanced natural language processing tasks [3]. Through this bridge, developers of AI systems and Web services are able to reduce the inequality in the quality of services received by the international users that has been caused by the imbalance of available human annotations in different languages. In general, emojis have evolved from visual ideograms to a brand-new world language in the era of AI and a new Web. The popularity, roles, and utility of emojis have all gone beyond people’s original intentions, which have created a huge opportunity for future research that calls for joint efforts from multiple disciplines.