To survive in modern society, what else do you need besides sunlight, air, food and water?

The answer is most likely: mobile phone, charger and emoticon pack.

On November 18, according to WeChat official news, WeChat launched 6 new emoticons, which sparked heated discussions for a while and were even dubbed the "soul emoticon pack" and "the same emoji for five princes" by many netizens.

6 new emoticons added to WeChat.

The "Let me see" expression is very similar to the expression of the character "Fifth Brother" in "Huan Zhu Ge Ge", and has become the object of ridicule by many netizens.

On the Weibo hot-search topic "#Don't just send text when chatting#", thousands of netizens shared their embarrassing scenes caused by only text chatting.

The expressionless text seems alienating on the screen, and the conversation ends in no more than three turns.

However, some netizens raised a small but powerful question: using the wrong emoticons when chatting is more terrifying than not using any emoticons at all.

Every migrant worker must have experienced the moment when he received a meaningful smile from his leader, and his hair stood on end with sweat on his spine, and then he came up with thousands of assumptions about the leader's true intentions.

This mysterious smile is so elusive to you.

Therefore, correctly understanding and using emojis has become an indispensable skill for men, women and children.

At the 2020 Zhengzhou High School Key Teacher Training Conference circulated on the Internet, how to chat with students has officially become a training matter, and the specific content includes: do not use expressions such as smiles and goodbyes, and replace them with bared teeth, cheerfulness and silly laughter; express happiness

At the same time, the number of "ha" must be greater than 5... These "unspoken social rules" are certainly useful, but the Internet that keeps pace with the times is always "the waves behind push the waves ahead". It is better to teach people to fish than to teach them how to fish, so we

I decided to carefully explore the deep logic behind the emoticon, find academic support for it, and remain unchanged in the face of changes.

Written by Xiao Shuyan 01 Intergenerational "Gap" Why can parents always misunderstand the expressions you send?

On Douban, there is a hot topic called "Misunderstandings caused by sending emojis to parents."

The reason was that some friends sent the "I was so scared that I dropped the melon seeds" emoticon to their parents, but they were bluntly asked, "Are you eating melon seeds?" More than 700 articles under this topic have been viewed 20 million times.

, it can be seen that there are many netizens who have encountered misunderstandings.

Someone specially sent a cute animal emoticon to his grandma to express his love, but he was criticized seriously: "I think your grandma is a dog. It is inappropriate to compare animal photos to your elders." This was followed by a shocking comment

A creepy mysterious smile.

Some people also casually added a "confused" expression when chatting with their grandfather. Later, they learned that their grandparents had not slept well all night after seeing this expression, and imagined their granddaughter to be the puppy standing alone in the ice and snow in the picture. Fuck

Heartbroken.

A more common misunderstanding may be to mistake the smoking "poop" for a cake, to mistake a malicious smile for kindness, or simply to mistake the character in the earthy emoji for his daughter.

Why do parents always misunderstand the expressions you send?

If you carefully summarize the emoticons that cause misunderstandings, you will find that there are two main reasons: first, they believe too much in the original meaning of the emoticons, a smile is a smile, and a kitten is a kitten; second, their sense of substitution is too strong, and there is no separation between themselves and the emoticons.

A strong connection was established between them.

But can you really blame your parents?

In fact, it is the younger generation that has gradually given it more meaning in the process of long-term use of emoticons.

In communication studies, there is a set of "encoding-decoding" theory. Writing and painting, for example, are both encoding processes. Writers and painters encode and transform their ideas and opinions into works in some way.

In the process of reading and viewing, readers decode the works in their own way.

But the methods of decoding and encoding are not necessarily the same, which is why there are a thousand Hamlets in the hearts of a thousand readers.

However, with the spread of the Internet, the younger generation has gradually unified a set of decoding methods through communication, and has continued to develop and extend this method.

For example, when the "smile" emoticon was first created, the artist might just be trying to express a simple "smile".

But in later use, someone realized that this expression reminded people of the Mona Lisa's smile, or a fake smile that was not smiling, and then added this derivative meaning to the decoding of the "smile" expression.

, and shared it with more netizens, the new meaning became a convention.

Later, more emoticons were created using corresponding encoding methods based on the complex decoding methods of netizens.

For example, there are various pitiful animal emoticons, or ferocious-looking runaway cartoons. Users do not really regard themselves as animals, or their expressions are distorted, but they are just used to express a "you know" emotion.