l had an interesting conversation yesterday night with my boyfriend about my recent depression, and he was trying to help me and give me advises. However, interestingly, what he said sounds serious and even a little bit offensive for me. l translated our conversation and attached here.
As you can see, his tone sounds calm and even feels “l dont really want to talk”, so l said sorry since l cant feel your tone implying that his tone makes me feel uncomfortable but l trusted he didnt mean it.
However, after l said that, he sent a sticker and l can suddenly feel what he means and can imagine his tone when he was typing them.
Just purely compare the conversation, can you imagine a little sticker can make a conversation easier?
Thats what l want to talk about next. These days, the use of emoji and GIF penetrates in almost all the conversations. Emoji & GIF are an exaggeration of expression and people uses them to show playfulness and try to relax stresses during a conversation. They are contentless if you just view them separately but are an essential elements especially in an online social network. l like using emoji & GIF in a conversation to portray myself as “friendly”, “humorous” trying to make a good first impression. More important, it conveys my feelings better than word.
However, because the wide use of Emoji&GIF, people starts to criticise that Does Emoji& GIF restrict our language? In the future, will the language content being replaced my emoji&GIF? During my language and new media lecture, we talked about this topics and l found it interesting especially when l coincidently faced the conversation with my boyfriend the night right before the lecture. In the lecture, we talked about phatic communication which was named by the anthropologist Bronoslaw Malinowski. Phatic communication is communication that is not really about conveying meaning, but rather communication that is intended to maintain and strengthen social relationships. Content is not the point of the communication. The point is to maintain a connection with the people we like. The meaning is secondary.
l also found an article about this question that the author related this social phenomenon with the famous novel 1984 that even the language and word choice is restricted in the novel. The author stood the same opinion as me that Emoji&GIF can conveys our feelings and emotions better than words. He also mentioned that, since abbreviation(such as LOL, IMAO) has already became a trend in internet conversation, it is a way of language change that we start to make shorter language. He questioned that will Emoji&GIF lead to another change of language? Or does this phenomenon means our vocabularies are shrinking as nowadays some people cant even spell some words correctly. In my last post, l talked about the power of videos and how it can affect our language. The power of image has already been here and GIF is also a way of imagery conversation.
l still holds an aspect that Emoji&GIF will restrict our language to some extents just like people love shooting videos to express their emotions. However, l feel no matter its video or Emoji&GIF, they just play the role of assisting us to express our feelings and emotions better, but the main contents are written in words. Imagine you chatting with your friend with purely EMoji&GIF, wont it look weird and you may misunderstand? Also, people have the ability to distinguish which situation shall we use Emoji&GIF and which we shouldn’t. You will use EMoji&GIF when chatting with your friends and families but definitely not when you are talking to your boss about your annual working report.
What do you think about EMoji&GIF? please comment below!
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