The Construction And Reconstruction Of The Meaning Of WeChat Emoticons By The Elderly

The reason why symbols are created is to convey a certain meaning to people.In reality,the communication between people is mainly carried out by assigning different social meanings to symbols.Emoticons is also a kind of symbol.It is an intermediary for social communication and an accompanying information data exchange tool,which is produced by the development of mass media and information technology.Nowadays,more and more people use emoticons to express their emotions and attitudes in online chat.This social phenomenon is gradually spreading from the young-age group to the old-age group.However,the old people are still in the shallow stage of being connected to the Internet.It’s easy to have deviation and dislocation in the coding and decoding of emoticons because ideology and values are quite different in different generations.And this even becomes a common problem of intergenerational communication.The essence of this cognitive gap is the problem of the old-age group’s cognition and construction of emoticons meaning.So what are the characteristics of the construction of emoticon meaning of the elderly? What factors will affect their cognition of emoticons? How to help the elderly to reconstruct their cognition of the meaning of emoticons? Those has become some urgent problems to be solved so that I studies this isuue.This paper mainly sets the study scene in wechat,taking the most basic emoticon in wechat system as the research object.From the perspective of meaning construction,this paper firstly adopts four dimensions,including situation,gap,bridge and effect.Then,this paper collects the semi-structured interview and dialogue texts of 20 interviewees and on this basis,I analyze the current situation of wechat emoticons used by the elderly in China.Research shows that the usage habits of WeChat emoticons in the elderly group have the tendency to close to the mainstream of Internet life.In addition,it also has the group characteristics influenced by its own living habits and consciousness.Specifically,the elderly show the characteristics of single choice,positive emotion processing effect and ritual sense;It has the situation of misuse and misunderstanding of emoticons;They mainly solve the cognitive problems of emoticons through the imitation of group behavior and the way of the young generation to actively teach the meaning of emoticons.That also shows the trend of the collision of new and old cultures so that the rise of post metaphor culture.The trend of increasing social awareness of the elderly and the continuous elimination of Internet discourse power.Besides,from the perspective of Cognitive Semiotics,this paper analyzes the specific situation of visual stimulation and memory,psychological context,cultural mode and cognitive model,and individual association ability in influencing the elderly group in constructing the meaning of emoticons.Finally,based on the above situation and influencing factors,this paper proposes the way for the elderly to reconstruct the meaning of WeChat emoticons from three aspects,including emotional design,visual design and communication design,so as to help the elderly to better integrate into the Internet culture wave.