Research On The Use Of Emoticons In Internet Interpersonal Communication

Nowadays,emoticons have become an indispensable ideographic tool in everyone's daily online communication and have flooded all social network platforms like WeChat,QQ,Weibo and Baidu Tieba.People use emoticons not only to express themselves in private online chat,but also to promote political appeal in Internet carnivals like "D8 Expedition".Based on the perspective of interpersonal communication theory,emoticons in WeChat communication are analyzed and researched in this study.WeChat chat records from a postgraduate school student from her five different types of interpersonal relationship and an in-depth interview with the same person are selected as the research materials.This study pays special attention to the connection and interaction between real interpersonal relationships and network interpersonal communication and emphasizes the real and natural use scenarios of emoticons.It's found that there are significant differences in the use frequency,emoticon types,emotions types,and emoticon styles in different realistic interpersonal relationships.Remarkable differences are also showed under different development stages of interpersonal relationships.The discussion in this study on the function of emoticons goes beyond the traditional perspective of viewing emoticons as non-verbal information.It's found that emoticons have the function of strengthening and replacing text information.During the message sending process of the communicator,the emoticons mainly play a role in strengthening text information.While in the interactive process of communication,the main functions of the emoticons are expressing emotions,forming impressions,and managing impressions.As showed in this study,motivation of emoticons usage can be divided into general motivations and special motivations in different interpersonal relationships.General motivations include the need to emotion expressions,aesthetics and convenient interactions while special motivations include the need to express politeness in workplace relationship and the need of impression management in all relationships except between close friends.The emoticons usage also has different effects on different interpersonal relationships.In intimate relationships,emoticons can help to maintain and enhance the relationships,on the contrary it has little affect on power relations.