I think the reason for this is that there has been a palpable shift in the content of what people are communicating… and the old rage faces are poorly suited to what people are using them for. They provided a different “visual vocabulary”.
The old rage faces served the purpose as shorthanding feeling and emotions visually. I’ll leave this as an exercise to the reader as to consider why 4chan users may have found an emotional shorthand vocabulary very appealing.
They were used very generally for storytelling.
Wojaks are primarily used to cue the reader to who is “good” and who is “bad”. Who is the cuck. It’s primarily a mechanism to lay out some type of disagreement and visually diminish one side. In this way, they’re not fla mechanism for storytelling, they’re a mechanism for persuasion.
“General storytelling” NOW comes in the form of a Twitter screenshot.
Anyhow, tl;dr: ragefaces and wojaks serve a different communicative purpose, and for some reason Twitter screenshots ejected ragefaces from thier niche
I’d argue that as wojacks became more mainstream they have partially evolved to be used as story telling devices as well, but the meme types themselves kinda fractured as the internet grew and evolved. There aren’t that many big chunky categories like “rage faces” or “advice animals” anymore, wojacs and pepes are used in a wide variety of things and also fused with something else
I think the reason for this is that there has been a palpable shift in the content of what people are communicating… and the old rage faces are poorly suited to what people are using them for. They provided a different “visual vocabulary”.
The old rage faces served the purpose as shorthanding feeling and emotions visually. I’ll leave this as an exercise to the reader as to consider why 4chan users may have found an emotional shorthand vocabulary very appealing.
They were used very generally for storytelling.
Wojaks are primarily used to cue the reader to who is “good” and who is “bad”. Who is the cuck. It’s primarily a mechanism to lay out some type of disagreement and visually diminish one side. In this way, they’re not fla mechanism for storytelling, they’re a mechanism for persuasion.
“General storytelling” NOW comes in the form of a Twitter screenshot.
Anyhow, tl;dr: ragefaces and wojaks serve a different communicative purpose, and for some reason Twitter screenshots ejected ragefaces from thier niche
I’d argue that as wojacks became more mainstream they have partially evolved to be used as story telling devices as well, but the meme types themselves kinda fractured as the internet grew and evolved. There aren’t that many big chunky categories like “rage faces” or “advice animals” anymore, wojacs and pepes are used in a wide variety of things and also fused with something else
For that I still prefer the virgin walk vs. the Chad stride meme mutations.
Spot on.
I find memeology fascinating. It really has shaped our world more than people might realize.
That’s really interesting and I think you’re right. I like your term, “visual vocabulary”. Rad reply
I also like the term “nonverbal markers”
I’m sure there’s a real English linguistics term but in sign language we use the term nonmanual markers (nonmanual like non-hand-al)