Language Media For Interpersonal Communication In Digital Era

As an indispensable communication symbol and visual language in digital era,emoji is a kind of graphic text which profoundly changes the communication mode and communication relationship of modern people.From early keyboard characters(emoticons)to tiny visual icons(emoji),emoji completed the transformation from information indicators to cultural indicators,promoting interpersonal communication as a profound cultural proposition.On the one hand,emoji play an essential role in building a new digital communication scene.Youngsters selectively use and combine different types of emoji for impression management,to perform emotional work,and adjust communication behaviors in a timely manner based on feedback to maintain the smooth progress of social interaction.On the other hand,the communicators reached agreed rules on the use of emoji in different relationships,which form a hierarchical Chinese-style interpersonal relationship,and the shallow social circle,the peering relationship,and hierarchical relationship thus come into being.Furthermore,the formation of this social and cultural landscape is inseparable from the internal symbolic logic of emoji.The signifier system of emoji is its representation of face expression and various objects and things in daily life,which in fact points to the social conventions and cultural content behind these symbols.What's more,the narrative strategy of emoji is based on the its syntagmatic relation paradigmatic relation.When emoji takes on such rhetorical functions as irony and metaphor in the process of communication,it will fight for and tamper with the semantics of text to a certain extent,and deeply participate in the process of expressing the semantics of communication Meanwhile,this study also suggests,by moving from an icon to an index and a symbol,emoji finally enters the sociocultural metalingual system and becomes an important cultural symbol.Precisely,emoji serve as a metalanguage in the strong relationship network,which dominate the generation of communication semantics.In a weak relationship network,emoji shows the phatic function and plays a role in maintaining contact.These two kinds of emoji functions constitute unique interpersonal relationship network in the digital age.