Creators deliberately minimize dialogue and use emojis to engineer cross-cultural reach

Evidence

The reasons for Ms Yeah’s national and international reach can be attributed to several factors. For one, she and her team intentionally position her videos for cross-cultural reach in the international market, revealing in an interview with Reuters that dialogue is minimized such that “everyone watches the video in silence, [and] foodies from all over the world can understand what we are doing”. She also uses “universally understood emojis” and subtitles if there is any dialogue at all, to give her non-Mandarin-speaking viewers context. — Crystal Abidin, Internet Celebrity, 136

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how do such deliberate cross-cultural design choices interact with the orientalism/exoticism reception frames from earlier in the chapter?
• XREF: connects to: Emojis crystallize the profit-driven aesthetic of flow and anti-mediation. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 73; Major social platforms degenerated into engagement-driven imitation lacking distinct culture. — W. David Marx, Blank Space: A Cultural History of the…, 702

Broader Connections

• Emojis crystallize the profit-driven aesthetic of flow and anti-mediation. #corroborates (0.85) — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 73
• Major social platforms degenerated into engagement-driven imitation lacking distinct culture. #qualifies (0.75) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 702