Elder Biaoqing: investigating the indexicalities of memes on Chinese social media

2.1 Indexicality

Indexicality is a central concept in sociolinguistic analysis. As observed by Labov (1963), by pronouncing “time” and “house” in a specific “islander” way, certain groups of inhabitants of Martha’s Vineyard not only could say referentially that they owned a house or wanted to know the time but also, not necessarily consciously, indexed their belonging to the island and their not necessarily positive attitude toward tourists from the mainland who pronounced these words in a “mainland” way.

According to Silverstein (2003), through indexicality we can see how micro-social values embody macro-social categories. This means, in Labov’s example, the realization of a specific pronunciation gives away a speaker’s position to a specific societal phenomenon and the people involved – here, mass tourism to Martha’s Vineyard. As such, indexicality is part of creative chronotopic identity work: using language or, more generally, semiotic signs in a specific place and time in a specific way reveals one’s identity, in other words, who one is or wants to be and what one thinks of others (see Kroon and Swanenberg 2020).

Silverstein (2003) argues that regular indexicality – or what he calls n-th order indexicality – is not enough to capture the ethno-metapragmatics of n-th order usage, or the creative realization of the ideological engagement with the n-th order indexicality. Such ethno-metapragmatic processes are our object of study, i.e. the total linguistic (or rather semiotic) fact – “unstable mutual interaction of meaningful sign forms, contextualised to situations of interested human use and mediated by the fact of cultural ideology” (Silverstein 1985: 220). In addition to n-th order indexicality, says Silverstein (2003: 194–195), we also need n + 1st, n + 2nd, etc. orders of indexicality to understand the “indexical ‘appropriateness-to’ at-that-point autonomously known or constituted contextual parameters: what is already established between interacting sign-users, at least implicitly, as ‘context’ to which the propriety of their usage […] appeals” and the “indexical ‘effectiveness-in’ context: how contextual parameters seem to be brought into being […] by the fact of usage of the indexical […] sign […] itself.” Appropriateness and effectiveness relate to “indexical presupposition” (what signage fellow sign users expect in a given context) and “indexical entailment” (what signage becomes inescapable in a given indexical context). According to Blommaert (2010: 33), “the two directions of indexicality (presupposing – the retrieval of available meanings – and entailing – the production of new meaning)” underlies the achievement of mutual understanding in communication.

Silverstein’s (2003: 227) argument boils down to the fact that “all macro-sociological cultural categories of identity, being manifested micro-sociologically […] as indexical categories, are to be seen as dialectally constituted somewhere between indexical n-th- and n + 1st-order value-giving schemata of categorization, wherever we encounter them.”

Biaoqing, used by hundreds of millions of people in Chinese society, need to be approached as a structural phenomenon. Each instance of usage is a one-time practice of individuals, and at the same time points to “socially and culturally ordered norms, genres, traditions, expectations” (Blommaert 2010: 33), i.e. the indexicality of semiotic resources which points to their social meaning and valuation that are invested with authority, control, and evaluation. In this contribution, we will follow netizens’ communicative practices and agency to explore the indexicality of Biaoqing, i.e. we will follow the total semiotic fact of Biaoqing.

2.2 Digital ethnography

Ethnography, emerging from anthropology as a field concerned with the description and analysis of culture (Blommaert and Dong 2020), is not just a complex of methods and techniques for data collection and analysis, but also a scientific apparatus with specific ontological, epistemological, and methodological perspectives on semiotic resources and communication (Blommaert 2007; Hymes 1996). The aim of ethnography is to “learn the meanings, norms, patterns of a way of life” (Hymes 1996: 13), which in essence is obtaining comprehensive knowledge of the society under study and revealing the social structure underlying communicative practices and social life.

Digital ethnography is the application of an ethnographic approach to the exploration of culture and society as shaped by digital technologies (Varis 2016). It does not entail the exclusion of offline data, but emphasizes the epistemological implications of digitalization for communication (Varis and Hou 2020), for instance how the internet influences and changes the essence and people’s perception of communicative practices. In what follows, the aspects most relevant for this research will be introduced.

Ontologically, Biaoqing are semiotic resources on Chinese social media, and their understanding cannot be detached from the society and culture which they are part of. This means the analysis of Biaoqing should not be confined to the textual level, but should be done with the whole society and culture as background.

Epistemologically, users’ communicative actions with Biaoqing will be taken as the lens to scrutinize the indexicality of Biaoqing. The reason for this is twofold. First, for researchers the lack of physical co-presence and mutual monitoring in online spaces leads to highly incomplete knowledge of who the users under investigation are. As a consequence, the study of online identities needs to resort to concrete communicative actions. Although online communication is greatly complicated by the uncertainty and unpredictability of user behavior (Skalski et al. 2017), what remains observable is interactional actions (Blommaert et al. 2021; Blommaert and Maly 2019). Second, interactional actions are conducted by participants to achieve mutual understanding, which is the process of creating recognizable orders for participants (Garfinkel 2006). In other words, through the lens of actions we are observing the social facts and social orders that render the actions meaningful (Blommaert 2018). To depict a clear and holistic picture of people’s communicative practices with Biaoqing and their indexicality, this contribution will take communicative action, i.e. what people do with Biaoqing, as its unit of analysis.

Methodologically, researchers need to enter the life-worlds of participants and follow their locally situated experiences in online spaces (Varis 2016). The first author of this paper, Ying Lu, has spent four years following and observing people’s practices with Biaoqing. This data collection experience makes her a connoisseur of Biaoqing, and her insider knowledge provides a reliable reference for selecting and analyzing cases. Since we are aware, however, of the potential pitfalls of being an insider, we applied researcher triangulation by combining Lu’s Chinese perspective and Sjaak Kroon’s Dutch perspective, i.e. insider and outsider perspectives, in the data analysis.

The validity of this research, which lies in the accurate understanding of the meanings of norms and institutions, is ensured by the ethnographers’, i.e. the authors’, familiarity with and knowledge of the society under investigation; the discipline of the scholarly scientific community of ethnographers; and the ethnographers’ self-correction in the process of systematic inquiry (see Hymes 1996).

2.3 Data

Data collection took place between September 2015 and January 2019 on various Chinese social media platforms (Sina Weibo, WeChat, Douban, Baidu Post Bar, Baidu Knows, bilibili.com). The result is a 4,398-item corpus (1.72 GB) of Biaoqing-related data, including posts, chat records, blogs, Q&A threads, news reports, and webpage articles.

There are numerous Biaoqing sharing many similarities. They mostly have one or more of the following characteristics: Cute, Mischievous, Decadent, Dirty, Violent (Jiang and Li 2017; Zheng 2016). These characteristics are endorsed as indexes to certain personalities, identities, or ideologies (Zhang 2016) (see Figure 1).

Figure 1:

Examples of currently popular Biaoqing (retrieved from https://image.baidu.com, 25 September 2019).^[1]

Among our data, we observed an increasing number of Biaoqing, however, that did not even come close to reflecting any of the above characteristics. We therefore decided to take this type of Biaoqing, referred to as Elder Biaoqing, which are specifically and primarily designed for and used by older netizens, as the object of our study. In order to further pin down these Elder Biaoqing, we resorted to WeChat, the most popular social media platform in China, with one billion daily active users by 2019, and therefore an optimal forum to observe Biaoqing usage.

On WeChat Biaoqing Open Platform, which regularly updates the ranking of the recently most used Biaoqing packages, we checked all the Biaoqing packages that had been ranked top 10 between September and November 2018. Among these 74 are Cute, 10 are Mischievous (of which five are Cute at the same time), and three are Violent (of which two are Cute at the same time). In addition, three are Chinese-character-based and seven are Elder style. Our WeChat observations confirmed what we had already observed on social media: Elder Biaoqing is a rising style.

The usage of Elder Biaoqing by older netizens qualifies or indexes them as belonging to a distinct category of older netizens, i.e. those who are abreast of fashion and have a young mentality. We also observed frequent usage of Elder Biaoqing by and between users who do not or only indirectly belong to the category of older netizens, for instance their children or grandchildren, the practice of whom is incongruous with and leads to problems in the field of the abovementioned indexicality presuppositions (why do young users send Elder Biaoqing to their peers, i.e. what indexical meaning do they convey?) and in the field of entailments (how do Elder Biaoqing meet the needs of young users, i.e., again, what indexical meaning do they convey?). The indexicality of Elder Biaoqing therefore cannot simply be understood by referring to an n-th order indexicality but is dialectically connected to that order at an n + 1st order indexicality level. There is, in other words, more to be detected around young netizens’ usage of Elder Biaoqing as a sociolinguistic phenomenon than just the fact that such Elder Biaoqing do not fit their social media interaction normativity. The ambition of this contribution therefore is to unravel the n + 1st and further order indexicalities of Elder Biaoqing usage.

To achieve this end, five posts and headers of the seven Elder Biaoqing packages that we found on WeChat are taken from the corpus on the basis of Lu’s deep knowledge of Biaoqing. Table 1 presents the information on the data used for analysis in this contribution.

3.1 Avoiding misunderstanding

With the growing presence of a senior population on social media, there is an increasing number of funny stories of this population’s misunderstanding of the Mischievous, Dirty, and Violent Biaoqing popular among young people. For instance, in Figure 2, after a mother inquires about her son’s work, the latter uses a Biaoqing as a joke – the frog with the exaggerated text “I’m so scared that I wet my pants,” a Biaoqing which might be used humorously and jokingly to express one’s fear or concern or ironically to express one’s indifference or contempt. But his mother takes the text on the Biaoqing literally and completely fails to pick up the intended humor. This misunderstanding originates from the mother’s “wrong” interpretation of the Biaoqing used by her son, which is an example of the Mischievous, Dirty, Violent Biaoqing dominantly used by young people. The meanings intended by youth usage of Biaoqing are not always predictable from the composing images and/or texts, and it often requires specific knowledge of online popular culture to understand them.

Figure 2:

Misunderstanding caused by Biaoqing between mother and son (retrieved from https://www.douban.com/note/599431525/, 13 November 2018).

Elder Biaoqing gradually came into being as a remedy for avoiding such misunderstandings. Such Biaoqing, as presented in Figure 3, usually feature positive expressions with bright colors and/or positive images, such as young people, flowers, butterflies, a national flag, natural scenes, etc. (GeFM 2017). A further characteristic of Elder Biaoqing is that the expressions and images are to be taken at face value (Huang and Pan 2017).

Figure 3:

Examples of Elder Biaoqing.

One of the top Biaoqing packages in September 2018 was an Elder one, the highest ranking of which was number two on WeChat Biaoqing Open Platform. In the header of this Biaoqing package, the designer Mr. Modo directly stated that this Biaoqing package is “specifically designed for your senior relatives,” which indicates that it is meant for young people to use with their elders (see Figure 4).

Figure 4:

The header of an Elder Biaoqing package.

Most of the Elder Biaoqing packages are made by members of the younger generation who take into consideration their elders’ (traditional) aesthetic taste, their (inadequate) knowledge of neologisms, and their unfamiliarity with popular online culture (Huang and Pan 2017). The original purpose of Elder Biaoqing is to avoid misunderstanding during online communication between young people and seniors. The emergence of Elder Biaoqing packages on Chinese social media is a result of the young generation’s reflection on their communicative need to use Biaoqing with seniors. This reflection simultaneously shapes the indexicality of Elder Biaoqing, that is to say, they are for older people with little or no grasp of popular online culture. This indexicality points to age and cultural differences between the younger and older generations, and is tinged with young people’s superiority, teasing, or joking regarding older people (Huang and Pan 2017, 2018).

3.2 Appreciation by older users

Older people are exposed to Elder Biaoqing through online communication, and they appreciate these Biaoqing. For instance, a father, as reported by his daughter, thinks Elder Biaoqing are practical (see Figure 5).

Figure 5:

A senior’s opinion of Elder Biaoqing (retrieved from https://www.weibo.com/2121087914/H9GAVxwNy?refer_flag=1001030103, 7 January 2019).

In this example, the father encounters Elder Biaoqing in a WeChat group. Regarding them as handy and useful, he asks his daughter how to send Biaoqing. Obviously the father and the daughter have different perceptions of and experiences with Biaoqing. For the father, the Elder Biaoqing he encountered are effectively all that he knows about Biaoqing, and he has no idea how to access them. For the daughter, however, Elder Biaoqing is only a trivial part of her Biaoqing repertoire, as indicated by the palm-over-face laughing-crying Biaoqing, which is typically used in reaction to a funny embarrassing story, in the final line of her post and the fact that she shared this incident in a joking tone with her peers on Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter. The user base of Weibo, 411 million by March 2018, is much smaller than that of WeChat, but the user group is much younger than that of WeChat (Tencent 2018).

There are many seniors who are fond of Elder Biaoqing and have become very resourceful with them. As a consequence, a young person in a WeChat group where the majority are middle-aged people might feel pressed to use Elder Biaoqing, as in Figure 6.

Figure 6:

Weibo post regarding older netizens’ usage of Elder Biaoqing (retrieved from https://www.weibo.com/2133789377/H9JA296AS?refer_flag=1001030103_&type=comment#_rnd1546870404529, 7 January 2019).

The examples in Figures 5 and 6 reflect that older netizens identify with Elder Biaoqing, eagerly access them, and enthusiastically use them. As using Biaoqing is a typical online communicative practice of young people, for older users, this practice is related to being chic (Zhou et al. 2017). In the eyes of seniors, Elder Biaoqing are not only practical in a pragmatic sense (as stated in the example in Figure 5), but also evaluated as indices of their chicness and desire to participate in online culture. Elder Biaoqing, for older netizens, have acquired the indexicality of being modern and/or having a youthful mentality, both highly positive valuations in contemporary China.

3.3 Usage of Elder Biaoqing between younger and older people

Although Elder Biaoqing respond to the aesthetic taste of older users, they are designed mostly by young people, which makes it advantageous for young people to further rationalize novel ways of interpreting, using, or modifying them. Based on the insider knowledge of Biaoqing ecology in Chinese society held by Lu, a representative example is how young people use Elder Biaoqing with their (grand)parents or aunts/uncles with a hidden feeling of superiority. In Figure 7, showing a screenshot of the chat between a son and his mother, the mother uses an Elder Biaoqing, after which the son replies with another one. In this exchange, out of pragmatic considerations, the son uses Elder Biaoqing to be on the same page as his mother so that their communication takes a smooth course.

Figure 7:

Chat record between a son using Elder Biaoqing with his mother (retrieved from https://www.weibo.com/5863930010/GEwkc2etS?refer_flag=1001030103_&type=comment#_rnd1541337852791, 4 November 2018).

However, this is only half of the story. After this chat exchange, the son posted the chat record headed by a short text on Weibo (see Figure 8) in order to share this experience with his peers. In the text message of the post, the son frames the practice of replying to his mother’s Elder Biaoqing as a competition in Biaoqing resources – a perspective the mother is unaware of – and underlines the fact that he, a millennium youngster, is resourceful in Biaoqing, even when it comes to niched Elder Biaoqing. In doing so, on Weibo he is highlighting his identity as a member of the young generation who is aware of his elders’ use of a different type of Biaoqing, and as a person who has sufficient Biaoqing resources for various scenarios, including responding to his mother, who uses Elder Biaoqing, with the same type of Biaoqing.

Figure 8:

Text in the Weibo post of the son.

In this example, the son conspicuously ascribes a different status to Elder Biaoqing compared to that of the Biaoqing he usually uses. Such practices of the young generation are de facto a reflection of the two indexicalities discussed above. Young people, by using Elder Biaoqing and “problematizing” such communicative practice on a meta level, distinguish themselves from their elders in terms of Biaoqing competence. As a result, Elder Biaoqing become indices to Biaoqing gurus and online culture-savvy persons, which is in essence a reflection of social status. Note that this indexicality has currency mainly among young people and not among older users.

3.4 Usage of Elder Biaoqing among young people

Building on the indexicalities discussed above, a further step of reflection on the part of the young generation takes place, namely, the use of Elder Biaoqing for communication with their peers, mostly in a light-hearted play, as illustrated in the conversation between two young women in Figure 9.

Figure 9:

Elder Biaoqing usage among young people (retrieved from https://www.weibo.com/5019193461/GDCuTvYUG?refer_flag=1001030103_&type=comment#_rnd1547044070505, 4 November 2018).

The young woman’s practice of using Elder Biaoqing with her peer as shown in Figure 9 forms a contrast with her own identity as a young person. In their chat exchange, her friend says in a joking way that the previous stretch of communication, polite and imbued with positive energy, made her feel disgusted, causing her to switch to the Cute and/or Mischievous type of Biaoqing which young people usually use (see the Biaoqing with “hahaha” in Figure 9). However, in their last exchange, both use an Elder Biaoqing to end the conversation.

The two friends in this example are not middle-aged, yet they enthusiastically used Elder Biaoqing with each other. They are, in other words, fully aware of the above-discussed indexicalities of Elder Biaoqing and tacitly reached an agreement to use Elder Biaoqing with each other, which is premised on their shared perception and knowledge of Elder Biaoqing. This practice highlights their “sameness,” i.e. their shared identities as Biaoqing gurus and members of the young generation.

Note that in this communicative event, both participants endorsed the Biaoqing-related behavioral trait of older users, i.e. using Biaoqing that uphold positivity. They also tacitly followed the norm that the texts on Elder Biaoqing are to be understood literally. For instance, they took the “再见” (bye-bye) on the Elder Biaoqing as a polite farewell, instead of as an expression of contempt, dissatisfaction, and irony, which is a result of nonlinear transformation (Blommaert 2015b) of the indexicality of “再见” on Chinese social media through the collective negotiation (or ethno-metapragmatics) of (young) people (Lu 2020). This example is an instance of reflection on the characteristics of Elder Biaoqing. Since it has been widely accepted that the texts and images of Elder Biaoqing are to be taken literally, this characteristic is collectively and tacitly accepted as a reference for interpreting Elder Biaoqing even when they are used between young people, and it has become a usage norm of Elder Biaoqing.

When we go through the Elder Biaoqing packages, we find that all the Elder Biaoqing are very simple phatic expressions for conviviality (see Figure 10). As Elder Biaoqing are palpably different from the currently dominant Cute, Mischievous, Dirty, and Violent ones, this difference in form is enough to index the intended uptake of Biaoqing purposefully designed in Elder style. The established form-norm configuration of Elder Biaoqing is employed by young people to revitalize the expressive power of daily mundane phatic expressions which have been eclipsed by the currently dominant Biaoqing, and to rescue simple phatic expressions from being interpreted as perfunctory and insincere. This is the result of people’s reflection on the usage and interpretation characteristics typical of Elder Biaoqing.

Figure 10:

Examples of Elder Biaoqing.

Taking this argument a step further, one could suggest that the style of Elder Biaoqing is employed to make Biaoqing packages specifically for young people to use. This claim is based on four observations. First, among one billion WeChat users (Tencent 2018), the proportion of users above 50 years old (80 million, 7.4 %; Zhou 2019) is too small to make Elder Biaoqing packages reach the top 10. This means it is mainly young people who are using them. Second, among the seven Elder Biaoqing packages ranked top 10, only one includes “senior” in the title, two mention “senior” in the header, and the other four do not mention “elder” or “senior” at all. Third, on many webpages, using Elder Biaoqing is tacitly regarded as the practice of young people. For instance, an article on Sohu^[2] describes Elder Biaoqing as a powerful resource in Doutu, literally a ‘fight using images,’^[3] a typical practice of young people: “When you are losing the upper hand in Doutu, Elder Biaoqing often can help you miraculously. They not only strike back on your opponent, but also have the ironic effect of ‘hehe,’ ^[4] helping you win the fight without really fighting.” Fourth, anecdotal evidence gathered by Lu suggests that many young people in their twenties use Elder Biaoqing with their peers. That is to say, Elder Biaoqing are no longer solely for use with older netizens, but for people, both young and senior, to use for their own sake, as shown in the headers in Figures 5 and 11.

Figure 11:

Headers of six Elder Biaoqing packages (September–November 2018).

The result of this reflection is the resemiotization (Iedema 2003; Leppänen et al. 2014) of Elder Biaoqing: they are extracted from previous frames and inserted in new contexts for communication. This reflection brings about new usage norms for Elder Biaoqing – to be taken at face value, and new resources to Biaoqing repertoires – Biaoqing for polite greetings. A corollary of this process is the new indexicality of Elder Biaoqing, i.e. polite and friendly phatic expressions for conviviality.

The example of Elder Biaoqing usage between two young women (see Figure 9) was collected from a Weibo post, the text of which is presented in Figure 12. Apart from the reflection embodied in the communicative practices per se, there is another layer of reflection embodied in this post.

Figure 12:

A Weibo post about Elder Biaoqing usage between young people.

The text of the post indicates that the poster was sharing the practice of using Elder Biaoqing as a joke. She also jokes that the next step for her would be to engage in square dancing, a typical activity of seniors in China.^[5] In so doing, she intentionally connects a typical offline activity of older people to Elder Biaoqing. That is to say, the offline practices of seniors are also added to the indexicality bundle of Elder Biaoqing.

The poster does not use Elder Biaoqing purposefully to mock older people. It is more about her own identity. As indicated in her post, she is aware of her age difference with older netizens, but she is using Elder Biaoqing, and ironically suggests she might later go a step further and take up the dancing pursuits of seniors. On the surface, she is mocking her actions, which are out of character with her age; on a deeper level, her post is a reflection of age anxiety in Chinese society, the understanding of which requires some degree of sociocultural background information. In modern Chinese society, the traditional Confucian doctrine “to stand firm at thirty”^[6] is still quite influential in evaluating the integrity of individuals, even though it is not really applicable anymore. Nowadays it is not so easy for people to build a family and have a successful career at such a young age (Zhang 2017). Caught between the stress of the Confucian criterion and such social facts, young people are experiencing age anxiety – the fear of getting old before achieving life goals and being left behind (Wang 2017) – which is the social origin of the oxymoronic neologism “middle-aged teenage girl” (中年少女) to refer to young women born in the 1990s (Weixiaobao 2017). In this case, Elder Biaoqing happen to be the media that reflect such anxiety. Consequently, Elder Biaoqing by chance become indices of age anxiety in Chinese society. Note that this indexicality is conspicuously different from the previous ones in the sense that it is deeply rooted in people’s subconscious reaction to the precariat state of educated young people in China (Du 2016), and that it might not be distinctly felt, not even by young people who use Elder Biaoqing this way.