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An Xiao Mina
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- 82
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- 2016-10-12
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- 2016-10-12
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“Like specific expressions of celebrities. So there's like a very iconic one of Jackie Chan looking confused. They turn that into like very simple black and white line art. And then it gets used to, they used to make comics where you would talk about a situation as you go through your day and the punchline would kind of be like that expression. And so it became kind of a universal language for emotions, which is really interesting. Because you could create a whole comic where the faces are changing very, very radically every frame, but you can kind of follow the story of the characters because you understand the emotional journey they're going through.”
2016-10-12 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Stickers! Filters! Memes! Livestreams! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so Rage Faces were basically, there was a subreddit for Rage Comics, but it was basically like, I don't even know how to really describe them. But I guess like they're the same thing as Biaoqings. They're taking.”
2016-10-12 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Stickers! Filters! Memes! Livestreams! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Poorly photo manipulated still images that they've turned into an animation. It looks a little bizarre, but I find it really endearing. But I think what's really remarkable about all of that is in China, you really have this kind of leapfrogging where all the generations are on, not just online in a way that you don't really see here as much, but on the same platform, right? WeChat is so dominant that. Literally, everyone you know is on it. And so you get all of this interplay of everyone playing in the same ecosystem but in different spaces within that ecosystem. And they develop all kinds of things on their own that are really fascinating”
2016-10-12 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Stickers! Filters! Memes! Livestreams! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Grandma memes on WeChat, which is the stuff that my aunties and my grandma sends over WeChat. And I love them because they're very, they're like pure and sincere. And they're almost like Hallmark cards. A lot of them are around the holidays. They glitter, you know, and like you can think of.”
2016-10-12 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Stickers! Filters! Memes! Livestreams! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, but you know, I see them exchanging these same type of graphics and they change the caption or punchline to your point, Connie. And it's kind of funny to see how differently they do it. So in the case of my, you know, some of the grandparents, they'll put like Gujrathi characters, which is our family's language. Or it'll be like a prayer or sentiment in one. And then like a total shopping sentiment in the other. It's just very, very bizarre map and kind of cool mashup of time as well. How does it play out generationally in China”
2016-10-12 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Stickers! Filters! Memes! Livestreams! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How about generationally? Because I'm comparing not having been exposed to this firsthand what you guys describe, I'm comparing it to WhatsApp and what happens at my cousins and relatives in India. And it's really both funny and ridiculous to see multiple generations from grandparents to parents, to kids, to really young kids all sharing these gifs. And Sorry Christina, I'm not going to fight with you on the pronunciation.”
2016-10-12 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Stickers! Filters! Memes! Livestreams! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, very, very common. That's very, very. Workspaces. How about I love it because it's fun. It kind of brings this personal feel to any conversation you have with someone in the workforce. And then so it is a self-reinforcing thing. And as it goes into one work culture, it can just continue to grow.”
2016-10-12 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Stickers! Filters! Memes! Livestreams! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In a lot of ways, in China, that was kind of already the case, like the work life boundaries seem a lot more porous there. I think it obviously depends on the organization, but in a lot of ways, like I saw a lot of, you know, people's bosses sending them voice messages on WeChat, you know, and at the same time. That's very, very common. So that's not even, whereas here we might think twice about, you know, can your boss text you when you're not at work in China? That's not even a thing. Right. But yeah, in the US, I think is where we're seeing the professionalization of a lot of or these memes infiltrate the professional workspace.”
2016-10-12 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Stickers! Filters! Memes! Livestreams! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, even on that point, the sticker phenomenon in Asia is not just being used among friends. It's being used in the workplace. You can send a sticker to your boss, you can send a sticker to a managing director, you can send a sticker to a founder or CEO.”
2016-10-12 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Stickers! Filters! Memes! Livestreams! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People somehow co-opted it into that use. It took off into that use and now it's been reinforced over and over again as opposed, even though that's probably not at all what that star intended or expressed. Just been appropriated into entirely new ways. Right. You know, it's funny we talk so much about cultural appropriation in certain directions, and it's kind of funny to see it happening in a different direction sometimes as we have more of these multi-layered forms of communication. The discussions around cultural appropriation will become even more complex. I think the issue at hand for me is whenever there's a power differential between entities, then that appropriation isn't necessarily appropriate. But I don't know. I mean, there could be all kinds of debates around that.”
2016-10-12 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Stickers! Filters! Memes! Livestreams! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. Yeah. So in China, there's one of, I'm like fascinated by which ones become part of the pantheon. So there's one of this American wrestler named Elijah Burke. And that gif was very popular on the American internet, but it really took off as a Biaoqing face in China. And he's kind of like looking at the camera sideways. And that one gets used to caption a bunch of different emotions. Some of it is like kind of challenging, but some of it is there's like a very common thread to a lot of the Biaoqing where people just use them to accuse other people of being opposer. And so there's like a wide variety of ones where people are just sort of saying in all different ways, like you're being a poser, let's go be posers together. You're posing work. You're posing didn't work, you know.”
2016-10-12 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Stickers! Filters! Memes! Livestreams! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Coming, yeah, or one of Yao Ming smiling, looking really happy. There's one of Barack Obama that's really popular. So in the West we have the same thing, I think. It was really popular on sites like Reddit or sites like NING. Exactly.”
2016-10-12 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Stickers! Filters! Memes! Livestreams! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would emphasize though the punchline is really critical because oftentimes it's the same image being used across a large, wide range of different reactions. It's that one sentence that goes above the image.”
2016-10-12 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Stickers! Filters! Memes! Livestreams! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To express It just goes to show how genius Kim Kardashian is with her set of Kimoji because she's essentially providing people a way to easily do that in the US. But what's also incredible about it is that I have the sense of a person as a single entity. And then you can now take and literally disproportionately blow up any one element, your eyebrows, your facial expression, your nose, your sneezing, your mouth, your smile, your laugh, your sadness, and essentially create this mosaic of different graphics that capture all these different elements. And it's a distortion and a form of expression at the same time, which is just incredibly fascinating. I mean, it gives a whole new name to the traditional ideas of remixing in the early days of digital remixing. We talk a lot about mashups where you'd have an overlay of one image or on top of another, but it really takes things to a new level.”
2016-10-12 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Stickers! Filters! Memes! Livestreams! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I kind of think that there's this funny interplay, right, between like, I want to show you that I'm expressing this emotion. And so I'm going to show you this very exaggerated form of the emotion. Via this celebrity expressing that at sort of the peak. It's the same way we use reaction gifts, right? Where you see people using gifts of like Nikki Minaj giving a side eye. Like you can't give a side eye as good as Nikki Minaj can. So you want to express that. It's like a pure form, the emotion. But at the same time, I think those faces and those expressions then become an emotion that you now have, if that makes sense, right? So you're like, oh, I feel totally Nikki Minaj sidey.gif about this. And so it actually shapes the way people talk to each other in a way and eventually it becomes codified in a really interesting way.”
2016-10-12 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Stickers! Filters! Memes! Livestreams! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are so many interesting threads to pull on that one. So, just starting with, first of all, the question of why celebrities, like what does that give the person who's doing that? Like, what does it provide them?”
2016-10-12 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Stickers! Filters! Memes! Livestreams! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or kind of this abstract face that everyone recognizes. And then it has a punchline to it too. So it's not just, you know, a happy birthday and there's a cake there, but there's an actual... Line that goes with it.”
2016-10-12 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Stickers! Filters! Memes! Livestreams! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's a great example of a recent one. So they're constantly making these new faces and updating the captions. And so like people in particular fandoms. So if you really like a band, you might have a Biaoqing set that just matches that band. Or once you start getting into a TV show, you would get a new set. So it's this like.”
2016-10-12 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Stickers! Filters! Memes! Livestreams! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To signify that this thing is so funny, we're crying. So that face gets used in a variety of contexts, Photoshopped onto these little cartoon bodies. And then there's all of these captions that get updated with every new catchphrase. You know, if someone says something really goofy online, it'll become a catchphrase in China. And then all the...”
2016-10-12 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Stickers! Filters! Memes! Livestreams! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“are like a little crappier than that intentionally degraded intentionally they're kind of more like rage faces if you remember that phenomenon from Reddit a few years ago So there are these kind of like often very poorly Photoshopped celebrity faces put onto in all kinds of contexts. And what I found was that the vast majority of them were actually static images because it was easier for people to go in and change the caption. The general format would be like a celebrity's face with like kind of an iconic expression. So there's a South Korean actor who's got this incredible laugh. His face gets photoshopped into all kinds of things almost the same way that we use the sort of like crying but happy emoji. Oh that”
2016-10-12 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Stickers! Filters! Memes! Livestreams! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I was focusing on Biaqing, which I think there is a very sticker-like element to them, but they're quite different from what we see in Snapchat or Facebook as stickers or even line where there's like these custom built sticker sets that all match and they're full of like characters.”
2016-10-12 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Stickers! Filters! Memes! Livestreams! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And there's a little bit of digital rights management on those sticker packs, but I think on the whole, Chinese app sort of tend towards openness. So they just make it pretty easy to download the actual naked GIF file and then you can do whatever you want with that.”
2016-10-12 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Stickers! Filters! Memes! Livestreams! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know about the brown and coney ones, but WeChat is sort of designed for you can have just your own uploaded gifts. So actually when my cousin had a baby, I made her a little Bia Ching of her baby as a present. Oh, like a little bit of a.”
2016-10-12 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Stickers! Filters! Memes! Livestreams! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, at least on WeChat, there is this ability to import any image from your photo album on your phone and make it into a sticker. And they have these automatic functions that strip out the background to make it look as close to a sticker format as possible. So you are able to actually import images and graphics from all over the web. So for example, a lot of the line characters, which include this very popular brown bear called Brown and a cute little white bunny called Coney, a lot of those characters I've seen people convert those images into WeChat stickers and actually use it on the WeChat platform. So you can really take an image from anywhere.”
2016-10-12 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Stickers! Filters! Memes! Livestreams! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How did the mechanics of this work out though because you're locked into with stickers a number of proprietary ecosystems where you have stickers on WeChat, you have stickers on Wayboys on US apps, you have Bitmoji, which has now been acquired by Snapchat. You have stickers everywhere in these different ecosystems. And one of the arguments that we made about emoji is that because it sort of translates interoperability, you know, unless, of course, like Apple and Twitter have their own proprietary emoji sets, that's not necessarily true of stickers. So how do you smooth this communication across all these different platforms and have these custom folders?”
2016-10-12 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Stickers! Filters! Memes! Livestreams! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, there's a sense of pride. Oftentimes they're traded almost like Pokemon carts, so you can throw out a sticker to a conversation. And if it's a really popular one, other folks will save it too and use it in subsequent chats. So there's a sense of pride with having the coolest sticker.”
2016-10-12 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Stickers! Filters! Memes! Livestreams! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so the term is Biaoqing, and it's usually used as the phrase Biaoqing Bao, which sort of means like bag of Biaoqing. And people talk about that in the same way that they talk about their reaction gift folders in the States. So it's sort of like the place where you collect all of these custom sticker-like things for your own personal use so that you can react to a wide variety of situations.”
2016-10-12 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Stickers! Filters! Memes! Livestreams! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, for example, if a sticker is of one person hugging another person, you can interpret that as a romantic hug. You can interpret it as a friendly hug. It's really up to the sender and receiver to kind of guess what that meaning is. But that's also what makes it so much more personal than just normal text.”
2016-10-12 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Stickers! Filters! Memes! Livestreams! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just to make sure we're all on the same page about the term 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 punctuation marks, which are used to represent figural expressions. Then we have emojis, which like punctuation marks can be put in subject lines and therefore have to go through the Unicode Consortium to be approved and vetted. And then on top of that, we have stickers, which are essentially GIFs or images that in BitMoji is a type of sticker, even though it's called moji as emoji in it, in that they're all just images and they cannot be put in subject lines, for example, but they do convey a lot of meaning.”
2016-10-12 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Stickers! Filters! Memes! Livestreams! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that you 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.”
2016-10-12 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Stickers! Filters! Memes! Livestreams! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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.”
2016-10-12 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Stickers! Filters! Memes! Livestreams! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hi, everyone. Welcome to the A6 and Z podcast. I'm Sonol, 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 Xi, 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.”
2016-10-12 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Stickers! Filters! Memes! Livestreams! · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source