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

Abstract

This paper adopts a digital ethnographic approach to analyze concrete communicative practices with Elder Biaoqing, a type of graphic semiotic resources comparable to emojis and memes, typically designed for and used by older people on Chinese social media. Following Silverstein’s theorizing, it reveals the emergence of multiple indexicalities of Elder Biaoqing that are a result of several social factors: the growth of an older population online, people’s reflections on their communicative needs engendered by specific social facts, and people’s ethno-metapragmatics. The study of Elder Biaoqing reveals users’ agency in creating semiotic resources, the inequality between digital natives and digital migrants, and age anxiety in Chinese society. The findings invite a re-imagination of social facts – the existence of an online–offline nexus and a re-thinking of theories for sociocultural research in a digital era – ontological perspectives on multimodal resources and digital infrastructures, developments of the theoretical perspective of indexicality, and a total-semiotic-fact approach to digitally mediated social interaction.