Abstract

This paper investigates the use of images and emoticons as well as the relationship between images and text on German Twitter and Chinese Sina-Weibo within the framework of the cultural contrastive approach. The study shows that Chinese writers use not only more images, but also more diverse images. The distribution of emoticons is also different: In German, the top emoticons can largely be described as semantically positive images. By contrast, some popular Chinese emoticons are acting contradictory to the corresponding text by modalizing the linguistic message sarcastically. These differences can be related to differences in media conditions as well as the respective socio-cultural constellation. Overall, however, more commonalities than differences prevail in both countries: Cross-culturally, flat pictures and simple text-image relationships are preferred, which can be explained by the mechanisms of the microblog in mass media.