South Koreans use emoji to express playful sentiments they wouldn’t utter aloud

https://www.1843magazine.com/technology/the-curious-adventures-of-con-and-frodo

by r0n0j0y • 10 years ago

66 25 10 years ago

1843magazine.com

wodenokoto• 10 years ago

Don't everybody do that with stickers?

bitwize• 10 years ago

It reminds me of Facebook stickers. I get those a lot from Asian friends.

jwagenet• 10 years ago

Perhaps because Line stickers are the archetype for Facebook stickers, which Facebook introduced to attract Asian users already used to sharing them on Line and Kakao.

personjerry• 10 years ago

Re: stickers

In Europe WhatsApp is a lot more popular than Messenger, and so people use emojis a lot, instead of stickers. Anecdotally I believe the amount of emojis in a conversation in Europe is many times the amount of sticker use in a conversation in North America.

silencio• 10 years ago

Aw, come on, mentioning Kakao Friends without Apeach? :) https://scontent.cdninstagram.com/hphotos-xaf1/t51.2885-15/e...

My last trip to Seoul I even picked up an Apeach pillow and set of peach-butt coasters from the Kakao store. Love that dude.

These are stickers for sure. My Asian friends and family use them all the time, including as replies on their own. Even my parents and 70-80+ year old relatives do this with regularity. The extra context that these stickers add are very useful and I wish they were more popular among my non-Asian friends. Somehow little rows of emoji and Slack reactions are just not quite the same.

rpgmaker• 10 years ago

Aw, come on, mentioning Kakao Friends without Apeach?

What about MSN Messenger Winks? They seem like a clear precursor to these Stickers and probably predate them by 5 years at least.

pcurve• 10 years ago

Kakao has some of the best stickers.

The best part is, most are animated. And really well.

You can see some of them here.. about a minute into the video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVpM8lUlMH4

There are constantly new sets coming out, and they are very cheap too. Most of them $2.

Razengan• 10 years ago

Line has cool stickers too, though I'm not sure if it has animated ones.

level3• 10 years ago

Yes, it has animated stickers, as well as ones with sound.

ajamesm2• 10 years ago

"Sorry, you need to enable JavaScript to visit this website."

then ctrl-W it is, please learn to render plaintext

current_call2• 10 years ago

curl is your friend

ajamesm2• 10 years ago

<sarcasm>can't see how <i>that</i> would be illegible</sarcasm>

mrob• 10 years ago

It's readable if you disable CSS (in Firefox: View, Page Style, No Style).

amagumori• 10 years ago

i hope stickers catch on here in america and dont just stay an east asian thing. i think they're a better form of expressing emotion than emoji. the "nice" thing about emojis is that they're standardized, but i don't think anyone realized how hackneyed and played out emojis would get. when i see tears-laughing-emoji these days, i roll my eyes, because i think of dumb instagram memes. in general, they're tiny icons that are kind of lacking in expressiveness to begin with. i've gotten really tired of them, and so have a lot of other people. you start to think they're dumb. stickers don't do that because they convey more complex emotional information.

i find with emojis that i always want new and more specific ones, and stickers cater to that perfectly. emojis are this wan, broad "happy" or "sad" emotional marker, which doesn't really convey all that much, while, as discussed in the article, stickers can convey really complex and pithy feelings related to the cultural environment people are living in. this makes them feel like a more honest and human method of communication through emotional pictograph, or whatever.

white-flame2• 10 years ago

The one "standardized" one that always messes up my communication is ":-P". To me, in ASCII, that's not a playful, smiling, stick out your tongue at your friend sort of thing, but rather an exasperated "Just found out I had to refile all my TPS reports. :-P".

While the only places I tend to have ascii->emoticon functionality is Skype and Slack, the auto-replacement for that usage never fits the mood, and I never seem to find a good representation of how I interpret ":-P".

But more to the point, I think that these stickers have already caught on as what we would call meme images, especially on image boards. They're just not well integrated elsewhere.

s_kilk• 10 years ago

To me, in ASCII, that's not a playful, smiling, stick out your tongue at your friend sort of thing, but rather an exasperated "Just found out I had to refile all my TPS reports. :-P".

I'd wager you're in a pretty small minority there. In fact, I'm struggling to think of a way in which :-P would not be seen as playful.

Do you have an example of the kind of facial expression you see in that particular sequence of characters?

DanBC• 10 years ago

The roll-eye emoticon is worse.

http://imgur.com/a/wxFNG

corv• 10 years ago

Yeah, I must be getting old...

protomyth• 10 years ago

The funny part is all the near future SciFi with kanji characters needs to have them replaced in a special edition with emojis.

ddp• 10 years ago

Along with the rest of Southeast Asia...

avindroth• 10 years ago

For a while, I thought it was strange how native Koreans would use extraneous ~,^^, ㅋ, and emojis in messengers.

Having lived here for over a year now, I see myself using those once-foreign symbols as part of my messaging jargon.

I feel it softens communication with the other person. The effect is similar to that of a smile; you can say anything while smiling and it won't look so aggressive.

If you message without healthy utilization of these symbols, the negative effect is similar to that of ending texts with period marks. No matter the content, the tone will seem aggressive.

South Koreans use emoji to express playful sentiments they wouldn’t utter aloud

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