'We have been deceived': why stickers replace emojis

In one of the chapters of Variations with text fragment (Terranova, 2018), the designer Jaime Narváez makes use of different emojis to tell the first page of Don Quixote. The book is a fun exercise that expands —including borders, letters and everything you 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 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 also many older people are already immersed in its use.

A sticker is an image, usually cropped, that serves to communicate informally in different social networks. Only a few months ago that the main and current version of Iphone, iOS 16, allows you to directly crop the background of any photograph and adapt it to the sticker format, without any application. TikTok has also included that feature recently. 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, through Line, which was the pioneer in the use of these, back in 2011. From those first drawings with big eyes and strong dynamism we have gone to an infinite personalization. And that's the greatness of stickers and the reason they're unseating popular emojis. "Academic works confirm that stickers are perceived as more humorous, 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 in WhatsApp and the evolution of digital communication. Sampietro, professor at the Jaume I University, also points to young people as dynamizers of this format: "Regardless of the evolutionary phase in which the graphic resources are located, the rise of stickers among younger WhatsApp users, to the detriment of the usual emojis, 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. "It is the younger generations who promote 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 character of certain expressions at a new time, their semantic expansion and the conventionalization of some meanings." And remember how it is likely that emojis have lost "pragmatic force" against stickers, which would maintain a "halo of novelty".

Erhan Aslan, Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Reading, points out in an e-mail conversation 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 a punctuation," he says. And he concludes that stickers may have more importance than text-based communication. "Because social media use is largely governed by positive emotion metrics (e.g., like, love, laugh), conveying these emotions is very important in communication, and stickers contribute to this goal."

However, 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 older people. "The studies I've seen focused a lot on the younger ones and forgot people like my parents, who are over 70. 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 comment, "says this professor of Spanish Language at the Pablo de Olavide University, in Seville.

For many users, the use of stickers replaces text, since it is not expressive enough. According to Francisco Yus, professor at the University of Alicante and doctor in Linguistics, with stickers you can communicate feelings, emotions, irony or humor correctly. "This is how emoticons made with punctuation marks [:-D] emerged, which have evolved into emojis and whose purpose of increasing expressiveness also includes GIFs, memes and alterations of the text to connote it with added information. It is not the same to type 'of course, I understand, than to type 'claaaaaro, I understand it', the second adds a point of irony that the normal text lacks, "says the author of the book Pragmatics of Internet Humour.

All of them make it clear that these new forms of language, generated by the use of technologies, are limited to digital networks. As 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 Spelling, has studied how young people make use of memes, stickers and emoticons and how these influence their more academic spelling. "We found that instant messaging applications incorporated into smartphones have favored the emergence of new, more or less spontaneous, forms of digital writing that are characterized by the use of alternative spellings to the norm of academic writing," he says. However, this usage 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 impair the knowledge and use of the orthographic standard," he concludes.

That 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 an entire story. Therefore, they have become a fixture of the chat platforms of young and old, not only to have fun, but also to create 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 that translated the World Health Organization's messages about quarantine and social distancing. "The reason my article is important is because it shows a side of stickers that isn't addressed too much: a lot of people think stickers are just fun tools, while my research shows how they work as more than just fun creators." Multimodal stickers that serve to save lives as well as to have a laugh.

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