In one of the chapters of Variations with snippet of text (Terranova, 2018), the designer Jaime Narváez makes use of different emojis to count the first page of the Quixote. The book is a fun exercise that expands —including borders, letters and everything that one can think of— that literary vision that Cervantes had during the so-called Golden Age. Today, mobile phones are the first to allow us to experiment with the language. Within the new forms of digital writing, generation Z and millennials, with their advanced use of stickers, are at the forefront of this development. But many older people are also already immersed in its use.
A stickers (sticker) is an image, usually cropped, which is used to communicate informally on different social networks. Only a few months ago the main and current version of Iphone, iOS 16, allows you to directly cut the background of any photo and adapt it to the format stickers, without any application. TikTok has recently included that feature as well. And from Instagram or Facebook we are already allowed to respond with stickers in private conversations.
To all this we must add the use we make of them in the different instant messaging applications, from WhatsApp to Telegram, passing through Line, which was the pioneer in the use of these, back in 2011. Of those first drawings of big eyes and strong dynamism we have moved on to infinite customization. And that is the greatness of the stickers and why they are taking over from the popular emojis. “Academic works confirm that the stickers they are perceived as more playful, elaborate and expressive visual resources than their predecessors, emoticons and emojis”, says Agnese Sampietro in one of the most complete studies that have appeared on the subject, The rise of ‘stickers’ on WhatsApp and the evolution of digital communication. Sampietro, a professor at the Jaume I University, also points to young people as promoters of this format: “Regardless of the evolutionary phase in which graphic resources are located, the rise of stickers among the youngest users of WhatsApp, to the detriment of the usual emojis, it can be considered as a sign of linguistic change, which also affects digital communication”.
His work is of interest because it highlights the use of these communicative elements among young people, who are the main drivers of the phenomenon. “The young generations are the promoters of innovation in the language”, explains Sampietro. “Among the factors that influence changes in the meaning of words are, for example, the loss of the transgressive or innovative nature of certain expressions that were new at a time, their semantic expansion and the conventionalization of some meanings.” And he remembers how emojis have probably lost “pragmatic force” in the face of stickerswhich would maintain a “halo of novelty”.
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Erhan Aslan, Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Reading, highlights in a conversation by e-mail that young people, or generation Z, who were born in the digital age, have more normalized the use of stickers, emojis or internet memes. “In fact, there is some research indicating that text messages that end with a period are perceived as less sincere than messages that do not contain punctuation,” he says. and concludes that the stickers may be more important than text-based communication. “Because the use of social networks is largely governed by positive emotion metrics (for example, likes, loves me, laughs), conveying these emotions is very important in communication, and the stickers contribute to this goal.
However, the older generations are also being permeated by the use of these stickers. In A discursive examination of the use of emoji in WhatsApp groups: a cross-generational study, Olga Cruz Moya sets her sights on the elderly. “The studies that I have seen focused a lot on the youngest and forgot people like my parents, who are over 70 years old. And analyzing them I found surprises, such as that they made use of stickers to say good morning or good night. They used these elements in a humorous, playful way or in some cases to decorate a commentary”, says this professor of Spanish Language at the Pablo de Olavide University, in Seville.
For many users, the use of stickers replaces the text, since this is not expressive enough. According to Francisco Yus, professor at the University of Alicante and PhD in Linguistics, with the stickers feelings, emotions, irony or humor can be communicated correctly. “This is how emoticons made with punctuation marks arose [:-D] that have evolved into emojis and whose purpose of increasing expressiveness also includes GIFs, memes and text alterations to connote it with added information. It is not the same to type ‘of course, I understand it, than to type ‘claaaaaaaaro, I understand it’, the latter adds a point of irony that normal text lacks”, points out the author of the book Pragmatics of Internet Humor.
All of them make it clear that these new forms of language, generated by the use of technologies, are limited to digital networks. As it happens with colloquial speech or jargon that we can use in other areas of our lives. Juan de Pablos Pons, Professor of Didactics and School Organization within the Faculty of Education Sciences at the University of Seville, co-author of Youth digital writing on WhatsApp and teaching spellinghas studied how young people make use of memes, stickers and smileys and how these influence your more academic spelling. “We found that the instant messaging applications incorporated into smartphones have favored the appearance of new, more or less spontaneous forms of digital writing that are characterized by the use of alternative spellings to the academic writing norm”, he points out. However, this use does not make young people write worse. “They are intentional discrepancies in the digital context, with respect to the academic norm. In fact, they are new forms of language generated by the use of digital technologies. Therefore, the use of these codes does not undermine the knowledge and use of the orthographic norm ”, he concludes.
that the stickers have replaced emojis, especially in the Middle East and Asia, is something that Najma Al Zidjaly, Associate Professor of Social Media and Arab Identity at Sultan Qaboos University in Oman, confirms. “The reason is their versatility, their perfect size, and the fact that they can replace sentences or tell a whole story. Therefore, they have become a fixture on chat platforms for young and old, not only for fun, but also for creating personal and national identities”, highlights the author of Covid-19 WhatsApp sticker memes as public signs in Oman. His research showed how Omani citizens created and shared stickers who translated messages from the World Health Organization on quarantine and social distancing. “The reason why my article is important is because it shows one side of the stickers that is not addressed much: many people think that the stickers they are just fun tools, while my research shows how they work as more than just fun makers.” stickers multimodal that serve the same to save lives as to have a laugh.
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