Eleventh International Conference on The Image

Abstract

Anthropologists, psychologists, historians, and philosophers concur that East Asians and Westerners have had very different systems of thought since the dawn of civilization. Cultural anthropologist Edward T. Hall (1914-2009) suggested concepts of high context and low context, describing people’s communication behavior and reactions to one another in different cultures. People brought up in a high context culture (East Asia being one of them) tend to imply a lot of meaning while transferring information. People brought up in a low context culture (Europeans, Anglo-Americans) exchange information explicitly through the message itself and they are rarely implicit or hidden. I explored how high context-low context scale, different styles of communication, and behavior patterns impact the visual culture, in particular visual communication in social media through the social networking service applications. I analyze visual cues of high context and low context in terms of the shape, content and style of emoji, emoticon, and stickers of SNS to see if there is any co-relation between the styles of communication, high context vs. low context, cognition of East Asians and Westerners and visual communication styles within online communication environment. I survey ready-made graphic messages such as emoticon, emoji, and stickers that are available either complementary or for purchase from WeChat (major Chinese SNS), KakaoTalk (Korean), Line (Japanese), and WhatsApp (U.S.), and analyze the way of visual expressions on those applications in comparative studies framework.