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CHAPTER 1
Emoticons: Cultural
Analysis
Myung Hae Park
California State University
Sacramento, USA
myung@csus.edu
ABSTRACT
As computer-mediated communication (CMC) continues to replace face-to-face
(F2F) interaction, the nature of communication has changed. Emoticons (emotional
icons) are facial expressions pictorially represented by text and punctuation marks.
Emoticons have become substitutes for the visual cues of F2F communication in
CMC, and have been used for many years to diversify communication in informal
text messages. This study compares and analyzes syntactic typographic structures
and variables between two different cultural emoticons, American and Korean, and
examines whether emoticons can be culturally neutral.
Keywords
: computer-mediate ...