The earliest origin of emoji is the smiley face symbol invented by an American, and as time goes by, various types of emoji have been derived, such as face characters, smiley faces, painted words, graphic narratives and moving pictures, etc. Since 2014, the founder of the Emoji search engine has even designated July 17 as the "World Emoji Day" every year. ". The real popularity of emoji originated from the widespread popularity of social software, users can not only use the emoji that come with the software, but also release their own design of exclusive emoji. Social software makes people's communication gradually from face-to-face communication to online interaction, more and more young people began to get used to in the virtual communication "fighting".
Emoticons can be seen as an important supplement to online text communication. Compared to face-to-face communication, it's harder for people to perceive each other's status or emotions during online text conversations, and sending emojis can make up for this shortcoming. When people want to express negative emotions or dislike others, sending appropriate emojis can not only express their own dissatisfaction, but also relieve the other party's embarrassment when receiving the message. Emojis can also enrich the details of text in a labor-saving way. For example, WeChat emojis can represent the state of laughter, such as "silly smile", "bare teeth", "cute" For example, the WeChat emoji can represent the states of laughter, such as "silly smile", "bare teeth", "cute", "sneer", and "smile", etc. When users want to convey happy feelings, they don't have to think about what kind of text to use more accurately, they just need to send an emoji to solve the problem.
In addition to this, emojis can act as a "code word" for the same circle or intergenerational group. Professor Peng Lan, a new media scholar, has written that emojis can be used as labels to separate generations and groups. The closer the conversation or the more like-minded people are, the more specific and vivid the emojis will be, which explains why emojis are less frequently used by subordinates to their superiors or by juniors to their elders. It's as if older people don't understand young people bouncing around, and young people don't understand older people dancing in the square, as different groups have their own code words and cultural symbols.
Young people often use emoticons with flirtatious, sarcastic or playful colors, while middle-aged and elderly emoticons are known for their quietness, peacefulness and positive energy, which also creates a difference in the perception of the same emoticon among different generations. For example, middle-aged and old-aged groups generally consider the "smile" emoji in WeChat to be a kind of happy smile, but young people consider it to be a fake smile with a sense of mockery and condescension because it is the same line of sight as emoji such as "sad" and "goodbye". The "smile" emoticon is a happy smile, but young people think it's a fake smile with a sense of mockery and condescension, because it's the same as the "sad" and "goodbye" emoticons, which are downward-focused and appear to be a smile of repressed emotion.