Hi everyone, welcome to the A6 and Z podcast. I'm Sonal. And today we're building further on our podcast on emoji, talking about stickers, streaming and all sorts of interesting cultural memes in the digital world in China and beyond. And joining us to have that conversation with us, we have Christina Shi, her last name is spelled XU, who is a tech ethnographer and previously has sort of been infamous for helping co-found RaffleCon, which is a conference about internet culture and communities.

And then we also have Connie Chan, who is our partner who covers all things China and who has written a number of pieces on China and has been arguing for a lot of the things that she and others like

Christina are observing as a new form of social communication. Why would you make the argument

that all of these things together add up to a new form of cultural communication? Maybe we

should start by saying, what are stickers? Let's just start there and we can take it to streaming

and everything else. There are graphics that don't denote just an emotion, but oftentimes an action or a phrase.

And what I find in Asia is that you can have a long conversation where it's just people sending stickers back and forth.

In the West, we've been so obsessed with the emojis for so long, but that is, in my mind, very obviously going to transition to stickers quite soon

because you can just convey so much more information in one single sticker versus an emoji.

I think that a sticker and emoji and all of these other media is a way to add nuance back in.

We used to hear the argument a lot that text-only communication, especially over email

or text, really stripped out all of these nuances of communication that you get face-to-face

or some people would even argue over the phone, although I disagree. Personally, I find text-based

communication better than the phone, and some people think otherwise. And I think it just is a matter of what

you're used to. So it'll be interesting to see what happens with this generation growing up,

what they're going to complain about as missing from the context when they're so used to this

rapid fire kind of sticker sending mode. I don't necessarily think of it as a new form of

cultural communication, but a way to supplement

what we already have in a very playful and expressive way. Just to make sure we're all on the same

page about the terminology, and especially because in our past podcast on emoji, which, you know,

listeners who haven't heard it are welcome to go to our website and find it. Defining the taxonomy,

so we start with emoticons, which are basically

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