The Use And Gratification Of Emoticon

With the appearance of the Internet, the world is becoming a global country. In this "country", we communicate, consult and cooperate with others with the help of computer-mediated tools. And among all kinds of medium, instant messaging(IM) is popular with its characters such as interactivity, convenience, functionality, meanwhile, with the fast dissemination of the Internet, IM also widen its users scale. And the most important is, emoticons which are affiliated to IM have played a crucial role.This research is based on the university students, with the framework of American communication scholar Lawson Green as well as the thinking path from requirement research to affection factor research. Through interview and questionnaire survey, this research aims to describe the use of emoticons among university students and find out the factor which effect the use and gratification of emoticons so that the relation model of emoticons use and gratification could be built.Eventually, this research discover that, expressing emotion, regulating atmosphere are the main motives when the students; the face graphic emoticon gained the highest use rate and friends and classmates are the primary receivers. Moreover,the students tend to collect and use emoticons which are sent by others rather than searching and downloading by themselves.Regarding to the effective factor, group communication, personal attribute, interactive partners and topics, the use frequency of emoticon are approved to have effects on the use and gratification of these emoticons. With the confirmation of these relations, the emoticon use and gratification model has built to represent the interaction of these factors.