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 just make up for this shortcoming. When people want to express negative emotions or dislike others, sending appropriate emojis can not only express their dissatisfaction, but also alleviate the embarrassment of the other party in 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", "teeth bared", "lovely" Professor Peng Lan, a new media scholar, has written that emojis can be used as labels for generational segregation and group differentiation. The closer the conversation or the more like-minded people are to each other, the more specific and vivid the emojis used will be, which explains why emojis are used less often by subordinates to superiors or by juniors to 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 for communicating with each other.
The emoji, as a subculture of the Internet, also represents the young people's pursuit of a hip lifestyle. Emojis do not exist in isolation, and are often associated with current social hotspots or Internet buzzwords. For example, the recently popular "inward roll", "lie flat", "emo" and "yyds" have all been made into Witty and funny emoticons have been created, which to some extent reflect the current attitude of young people. Network technology has empowered youth groups, and every netizen can participate in the production and sharing of emoticons, which are graphic symbols with subcultural attributes that have to a certain extent dissolved the serious way of discourse. For example, many college students have had the experience of photographing their teachers' lecturing manner and making them into emoticons. Transmitting the teacher's emoticons in the course WeChat group can not only enliven the atmosphere of the virtual community, but also bring teachers and students closer together.