Cross-Strait Internet Trolling:Digital Memes And The Construction Of Collective Identity

The booming of the internet in China offers a completely new area for human's meida empowerment,which provides more and more ways for internet users to express themselves and motivate others to take part in the internet activities.Emoji package match is a new concept recently popular in internet public sphere,which is worthy of researching.As we know,the traditional internet studies mainly focus on the image,text or people involved,and less attention was paid to the emoji package.If there were any,the researchers emphasize on the development of emoji package and its communicative function.Based on the meme perspective,the paper aims to use meme analysis to study the change of meaning of emoji package,taking the breaking event"Empire Bar invading Facebook" broke out at the beginning of 2016 as example.Then,this paper will conduct a on-line in-depth interviews on the users and makers of the emoji package and the participants of this internet action,trying to discuss the interaction between the emoji memes and the makers.Through the study,the paper found that the emoji package memes carry political meanings at first.However,as time going,the political meanings began to be weakened gradually as the emoji package memes' amusement value were excavated.The political meanings of emoji package then vanished with the internet memes communication.