A Predisposed Disappointment

March 30, 2023 4:03 PM

It may seem strange to apply a theory developed with respect to such significant world events to stickers, a medium primarily concerned with circulating images of lazy cartoon ducks and the like. But that is part of the point. Stickers reveal how the realities of public secrecy in China within the culture of the everyday have crystallized. With stickers, the tactics of visual ambiguity, remixing, humor, affective masking, irony, and ambivalence — once the preserve of artists dealing with significant political events — have become a primary part of mundane visual expression. from Speaking in Stickers by Krish Raghav

Related, previously

posted by chavenet (9 comments total)

" In giving spectators a “code to crack,” photo forms allow for liminal, conspiratorial spaces of emotional expression. Stickers can likewise help bind marginalized groups together: queer-coded stickers, stickers for niche fandoms, stickers for people in particular workplace conditions. In large WeChat groups — perhaps the single most common mode of social engagement for most Chinese today — sticker choices function like tote-bag slogans or T-shirt patterns: the means by which beliefs and interests are announced and decoded."

Interesting essay, thank you.
posted by MonkeyToes at 4:28 PM on March 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

Yeah, this is really interesting. I’m not sure about stickers having “no direct equivalent elsewhere”—I’ve never used WeChat, but nothing about the description in the article (ubiquitous, essential, incredibly diverse, always readily at hand UI-wise, used by themselves as replies etc.) sounds different from how LINE stickers work in Korea, Japan, and I assume elsewhere where LINE is dominant. Did LINE just copy WeChat’s approach, making it a Chinese innovation later adopted in neighboring countries? Or could “stickers” as such be more usefully viewed as an innovation shared across (parts of?) Asia, with a unique expression in China shaped by China’s unique political/internet landscape?
posted by No-sword at 7:19 PM on March 30, 2023 [3 favorites]

Discord has stickers. In my (American) experience, nobody ever uses them. But it's interesting to finally know why Discord has them, so this article was helpful.
posted by one for the books at 8:54 PM on March 30, 2023 [2 favorites]

Yeah, I've noticed that "stickers" have become a feature in a number of chat/IM apps in the last few years, and nobody I know really uses them. It seemed like a sort of oddball feature to spend developer time on.

But now it makes more sense. In some markets that's probably table stakes to get people to even consider using your app/service.
posted by Kadin2048 at 9:16 PM on March 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

More previously (from London this time).
posted by Paul Slade at 11:13 PM on March 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

This piece really made me miss Chaoyang Trap! Here is their 2021 piece on WeChat's "Moodboard Industrial Complex" (hehe), featuring a very cute little cat ("So YimaoRen is a...person? Not a cat." "How can I explain this to you? Do you know Hello Kitty?") and a bear who is not quite so cute ("I’ll send a few stickers, shitpost in my mind, and go back to drawing by myself.")

OH MY GOD...I went to see whether that piece had ever been posted on mefi...and how did I not realize this was also a metafilter project?!?!?!?! MY MIND IS BLOWN. CAN WE HAVE STICKERS INSTEAD OF AN IMG TAG?
posted by mittens at 5:09 AM on March 31, 2023 [3 favorites]

Not only that but I just now see that this article is by "MeFi's own" beijingbrown
posted by chavenet at 6:01 AM on March 31, 2023 [1 favorite]

For a person whose eyes are aging, stickers can be hard to use in WeChat -- the miniature version upon selection may have a suitable anime character in the right pose, but the text that goes with it might not be quite right -- and there's no way to preview a sticker at full size just to make sure.
posted by of strange foe at 11:38 AM on March 31, 2023 [1 favorite]

Thank you for posting this, @chavenet!

@No-sword: It's the other way around - Wechat copied LINE! I had a whole section in an earlier draft about how Wechat stickers evolved both from LINE's cartoon menagerie and QQ's biaoqing memes but it was cut out. I agree that "no direct equivalent" is perhaps a bit overstated, but Wechat's scale is just so much more massive than LINE.

@mittens: Haha I was co-writer on that Choayang Trap piece! This essay grew out of the interviews we did for it.
posted by beijingbrown at 4:24 PM on March 31, 2023 [5 favorites]