Cross-Generation Communication: How The Young Adults Replied for the “Blessing GIF” on the LINE Application? (Poster 11)

Line is the most-used mobile chat application in Taiwan. The “blessing GIF”, similar to Internet “Meme”, a square-shaped picture with texts, is a popular around elderly people. Previous research has primarily focused on the intension of elders sending “blessing GIFs,” but rarely on the receivers’ perspective. The purpose of this study was to achieve a better understanding of young adults, aged 18-45, in reacting to the receiving of blessing GIFs from the elder friends and relatives. In this study we use online questionnaires to investigate the responses and attitudes from 330 young adults, 316 have received “blessing gifs” while the rest haven’t. This study focused on how young adults responded to four different types of “blessing gifs”: greeting type, fun type, hortatory type, and news type, as well as what their attitudes towards “blessing gif” in Line app were. Results of this study revealed that young adults preferred “leaving someone on read” in greeting, hortatory, news type, and “reply with stickers” in fun type of “blessing gif.” Young adults agreed that “blessing gifs” could be seen as a channel of companionship and emotional expression from their senior friends and relatives.