It's worth noting that Kundera's interpretation of kitsch (as a socio-political phenomena rather than an aesthetic quality) is pretty fringe and generally not recognized outside the lit crit community. You won't find it being taken seriously in academic circles focused on sociology, politics, etc., mostly because there are far more elegant and explanatory frames of reference for discussing the phenomenon Kundera describes (mostly drawn from psychology).
Are there any symbols, emoji or not, that have unequivocal meaning? I recall the discussion around creating the symbol for "radioactive", and the challenges around making a symbol that would convey that meaning for thousands of years:
How is this different from sharing an image? I get the advantages of SVG over JPEG or PNG, but that's just a platform support issue.
The other thing that Emoji have going for them is that they're text and can appear where text does, and for that to work I am pretty sure you need a Unicode Consortium.
Oh god why. This is like the 21th century update to Zawinski's Law: every data interchange format will eventually expand to encode arbitrary binary data. Unicode is a text standard and even including wingdings symbols and emoji was pushing it, please kill this in the cradle.
Think about the 1700s, when printing presses had existed for a few hundred years (since 1439) to transfer data between people. Books were expensive, though. Would you have been able to imagine that in 1975, printed paper would be created each morning, and hauled around to everyone's door step in time for breakfast?
Now think about us sitting here in 2018. Computer rendered text has been around for a while (ASCII, UTF, .doc, .html, etc.) In another 200 years, the way we transfer, encode, and view those formats will be completely perfected and probably unrecognizable to us. They will probably be ubiquitous in a way that seems completely alien to us now, and all of the implementation issues we worry about in 2018 will completely fade away (proprietary vs. open, security vulnerabilities, compatibility, accessibility, etc.).
With this in mind, being reluctant to add enrichment to how document transfer works seems like it's obviously on the wrong side of history.
This is all over the road, but that's not out of the ordinary when it features "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" being name-dropped in the middle of it. I don't really get the axe-grinding about stereotypical nerdboys having some nefarious influence on expression through control of emoji fontsets.
Emojis are silly little pictograms. If you want something more varied, send an image or a gif or a meme. Or settle down and type out a few of these things we call words, that have the capability to be very expressive and unambiguous.
I think that the article makes a pretty good point that emoji are increasingly important in communication -- referencing the suggestion of the mosquito emoji that was supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in order to facilitate communication and discussion about the malaria-spreading insects. Even though I don't completely agree with the importance of emoji in modern communication, apparently a lot of people (especially some of those who vote on the Unicode Standard Consortium) do.
If you were to accept that emoji are an important part of modern communication, would you not agree that censoring certain images is akin to censoring words? Then, the reference to "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" is very apt.
I didn't get the impression that the article was suggesting that the people who vote in the Consortium have any sort of nefarious intensions -- and I don't think that there is much to be gained by a fascist government by censoring the word "shit". The decision to do stems from personal taste, prudence, or social pressure. It is not the intention behind it that we should be afraid of, but the power of some organizations to form our means of communication, independent on how "good" they are, as there are many unpredictable factors that can shape their decisions.
An early example of this is http://xn--n3h.net/ or snowman in hat dot net (turns out hacker news strips unicode emoji.) Some browsers convert to punycode to reduce the incidence of phishing attacks based on homoglyphs (two characters that look the same).
I think the solution is a universal standard for multimodal interfaces that allows external and attached content.
An example of this already exists: in a Facebook comment, you can reply with an arbitrary meme, and I believe Slack lets you define emojis as well. We could extend this to include sound, or even modes for haptic or braille feedback. If there isn't space to attach the mode you could simply provide a URL.
This could be turned into a standard, and apps could implement the standard, allowing people to communicate with richer content across a wide array of technology.
But in slack emoji, you have to modify the universal standard for the workspace in order to add those emoji, and now you're back to where you started.
The whole benefit of Unicode is that anyone anywhere can see Unicode on any device that supports it, without introducing added complexity of sending the actual image over the message.
IIRC Unicode was intended to encode and represent text for writing systems. I get that the purpose of emoji in Unicode is to provide a universal way to represent certain pictures, but it's clear that we also don't want to be limited by the set of pictures we can send.
It seems a lot more sensible to actually send the picture you want to send, or a link to that picture, because that doesn't need to be interpreted differently by each client... just rendered. Sending the actual image might take more space in, say, a text message, but its actual encoded size should be pretty trivial. For example, one of Twitter's 16x16 color emoji is a 400 byte SVG file. Base64-encoded that would be about 533 bytes. The standard could define the image formats accepted, with probably one ideal format for emoji (SVG) and another for memes (JPEG).
Here's another way to think of how you could implement this in a standard. Each message is multipart. The text body is the first message by default. That text can contain references to other parts. That reference could be the name of the part you want to reference in that message, and that name would only need to be unique to that message. But that name could also be, for example, a SHA hash. When you accept messages, you could store the message parts in a database with their SHA hash. When someone sends the same part again in a new message, you can just retrieve that part from your database, rather than storing the same part multiple times. This could allow you to send messages referencing the same gigantic meme file 50 times, but you only ever store it the one time, and after that you just store references to it. The standard would allow you to simply say "please reference part X in this part of the message text, and if you don't have that part yet, here it is, base64-encoded or linked via URL".
(What I just described is MIME, but you could reinvent it if you wanted people to adopt it, because people don't like adopting things that aren't new and cool)
> IIRC Unicode was intended to encode and represent text for writing systems.
Nonsensical garbage. The Arrows, Technical, Box Drawing, Block Elements, Geometric Shapes and Miscellaneous Symbols blocks were all part of Unicode 1.0.
> It seems a lot more sensible to actually send the picture you want to send, or a link to that picture, because that doesn't need to be interpreted differently by each client... just rendered.
1. Except now you need to design a way to design and render mixed content.
2. If that's your argument, why even have letters and fonts? Just send the right images.
Uh, it's not nonsense or garbage, for multiple reasons. The first and foremost is that just because the first version supported arrows and geometric shapes does not mean it couldn't have been invented as an encoding for writing systems. The second reason is that I actually read what it was created for. https://www.unicode.org/history/summary.html The purpose was to encode the characters used by written languages for expressing language in a legible form. This includes multiple forms of graphemes.
Apps already have ways to render mixed content. How do you think you can see both text and pictures next to each other? E-mail has supported this for decades. The linked article even explicitly mentions how different apps render different image sets for the same emojis.
We have different fonts for several reasons, and sometimes we do send entire fonts in order to render our messages correctly. What font you use, and how you choose to render graphemes, is completely up to the application. What I'm proposing is a more interoperable way of sharing mixed content, which people clearly already want to do.
Where are the emojis for pain? And why are there so many happy family emojis? People (and "corporate people") who care enough to get emojis put in by buy votes at the Unicode Club seem to have super weird values totally detached from humans who send each other messages.
I'm not sure people who would want pain emojis care enough to buy votes at the club.
Besides, at least as far as Discord/Slack goes, most people I've found just upload their own little emoticons as they are more meaningful and great for inside jokes on a particular server/team.
In Japanese, ideographs (Kanji) are paired with syllabic characters (Hiragana) to express things which Kanji alone cannot. Foreign words are spelled in Katakana (another syllabic script). There's also romaji -- a way of writing Japanese in the familiar Latin alphabet.
Incompleteness is manifestly NOT a problem for an ideographic script.
Maybe it’s just that people tend to use emojis for shallow, often humorous exchanges. If you have to express pain, using an emoji seems like a bizarre way to go about it rather than employing language.
- They changed the gun emoji to be a water gun, which has a totally different meaning. This retroactively changes previous writings, changing their meaning. What kind of writing system allows people to change your words after you've written them? Emoji is a trash writing system and an agent of kipplization.
- Emoji is controlled by corporations that are concerned with maximizing the value of their platforms which will lead them to a PG13, disneyfied, milquetoast worldview.
The good news:
- In the entire human history, it has never been easier to create and publish text, audio, or video works of any kind. The most popular platforms have severe limitations, but it only takes the slightest effort to use other platforms that are uncensored.
- There is plenty of free software that can give you pixel-level control over your output, you don't need to rely on the unicode consortium or any other organization of any kind to determine what you express.
They changed the gun emoji to be a water gun, which has a totally different meaning. This retroactively changes previous writings, changing their meaning.
From the op:
In his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera linked this kind of forced conformity to a fascist government’s unbounded desire for control, and its efforts to limit expression to kitsch, a cartoonish denial of objective reality
This is also a historical feature of communist governments. All governments, and all societies, in as much as they lose a commitment to individual rights, will tend to grab more and more control in pursuit of difficult goals. It's yet another thing that seems "nice" but which has disturbing implications under the surface for free speech, like Canadian Bill C-16.
Frank Herbert once made the observation that corporate hierarchies were very similar to feudal hierarchies, just with milder consequences for disloyalty and failure. (The hierarchies within organized crime are even closer to the feudal ones, even including the feudal ceremonial trappings. This even works across cultures, where Japanese organized crime harkens back to feudal Japan and Italian/Sicilian organized crime harkens back to medieval and rennaissance Italy.) Along this line of thinking, corporate flavored collectivism should be structurally similar to Stalinist USSR, including the requirement for ideological conformity. However, the branding is likely to be far, far different.
Corporations certainly have purges. Happens all the time after mergers.
Both are authoritarian political philosophies with a heavy handed approach to economic policies.
Differences come in privatization, immigration, equality of rights, and religious toleration. [1]
Both have extreme takes on ideas falling under the umbrella of socialist thought (hence, Germany's National Socialist Workers party). You can argue 1984 vs Brave New World, but there are certainly common themes.
Both differ significantly from classical liberalism.
A friend of mine also pointed out that they appear to have different attitudes towards hierarchy. At least, the Marxist derived authoritarians brand themselves as egalitarian -- though they usually go ahead and have hierarchy anyway, having it both ways. Fascists and Nazis also seem to emphasize community while extolling elites, great men, and meritocratic hierarchy -- also having it both ways. It's just that the branding is different.
There is a very clear and distinct difference between words changing meaning over time, and drastically changing the appearance of a word or symbol in previously written texts.
Yea wasn't a big problem we faced during the early days of nuclear technology was creating a symbol that would convey danger over long periods of time, in a world where language is constantly changing.
I expect at least to be able to view the sequence of symbols that was emitted by the author. Because the majority of writing is digital, and because of the way it is stored, I think changing the emoji is especially deceptive and malicious, but emoji are so silly anyway it is hard to get really properly upset about it.
In my opinion if the people that changed the gun emoji had done it by introducing a new watergun emoji, replaced the gun with watergun on the keyboards, and declined to make their devices capable of emitting the sequence of bytes representing the gun, I would have been fine with that, and for their preening purposes I think that would have been sufficient. I'd consider that annoying and rude, but not malicious. If you have a unicode text file with the gun emoji, and you don't know when it was written, you genuinely can't tell what the author wrote as a symbol, even ignoring all the complexities of language, almost as if the word was blurred, and you can't tell between two possibilities.
> What kind of writing system allows people to change my words after I've written them?
Any kind of writing system allows this. Translation changes the words, and can change meaning. People can mis-quote. And yes, over time, meanings of words change, as do the cultural contexts from which they came. None of this is unique to emojis.
The truth is that all communication has at least two parties, and there is never a guarantee that the receiver will get the message as intended. Even if you do craft "pixel-perfect" emojis, people still can (and likely will) mis-understand the nuances of your intended message.
Meaning changes over time, but the words you've written usually dont. They might be interpreted differently in the future, but when you said gun, you said the word gun.
In the case of emoji, we're aceepting the idea that when I said gun, I in fact did not say gun, I said water gun. You can interpret the water gun as gun or water gun, but really I never said gun
Thing is, if you said gun in 2015 to owners of a Windows Phone, they heard laser pistol. Emojis were never an universal standard, just a broad approximation.
Even so, at least you have the chance to be aware of that; if I typed this sentence using emoji, its impossible to know what it will appear as in 5 years, without seeing into the future.
this comment could be interpreted as a threat 50 years down the line, by the change of meaning over time, but any sane person understanding that history and context matter, with knowledge of how it would be interpreted today, would realize its not. But if we applied the same acceptance to text as we do with emoji, the whole thing could be changed such that in both this time, and 50 years from now, it would be interpreted as a threat. The same context argument could apply, but I'm also sure defenders of the change would also not see the need to maintain a log of how things have been changed, as I doubt they care about emoji changes today.
The words themselves aren't simply appearing differently; they're changing, right from under my feet. The only defense is that (afaik) the unicode assortium has not changed yet changed the naming for it (ie CRYING FACE EMOJI), but since no one in practice refers to that definition, its not a useful defense.
Thus, emoji in their current form are highly inappropriate as a medium of communication, except in the very limited use case of short-lived, impermanent, and same-implementation communications.
But since this constraint is not the intention of the unicode consortium, and this is not the intention of the groups/font-creators that support emoji, and this is not a limitation that the general user expects, then this is a very poor design.
Emojis have been accepted as intentionally corruptible communications, but no party involved actually realizes the implications of it. We don't change ascii (ignoring the latter 127 characters, which are open to any interpretation) except by accident and by intentional non-meaningful changes (changing fonts does not change the characters themselves, just their aesthetics [except I guess wingbats]), and everyone would throw a fit if they did, because the notion is absurd
When "gay" changed from "happy" to "homosexual", it (1) took many years (starting over a hundred years ago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay) and (2) happened as hundreds of millions of English speakers came to a consensus -- or at least an overwhelming acceptance -- about the word.
When "pistol" changed to mean "toy gun", it (1) happened in two years and (2) was decided by an oligarchy of actors (and not even the Unicode Consortium oligarchy).
It didn't in this case either, it changed because a group of private platform vendors decided they agreed with the rationale one of the other vendors had for changing something.
Why do you not consider that to be "top down orders"? Sure, the orders came from a few execs at a few companies, rather than from the president, but it still looks top-down to me. Specifically it looks top-down in contrast to slang changing rapidly due to current events (which was the original context), which involves a bunch of people having a new reference point, and choosing to use that in their speech.
It also didn't come to mean that at the behest of those in control of the glyphs. It came to mean that in an organic, even memetic fashion. That's the difference.
There is a difference between organic shifts in language use over time and forced shifts made by an influential few motivated by some misguided urge to improve society by limiting the range of thought.
Think of the word "gun". The image that entered your mind just now was not a water gun. It was a weapon, the kind of device the gun emoji used to depict and now no longer does.
The people forcing this kind of change want you to associate the concept of a gun with a water gun or other toy, and they think that by changing your though pattern this way, they'll make society safer.
This is terrifying and totalitarian idea. Once you buy into the idea that you can force a change to the language to achieve your desired social aims, there's no intrusion into private life that you will be unable to justify.
> The people forcing this kind of change want you to associate the concept of a gun with a water gun or other toy, and they think that by changing your though pattern this way, they'll make society safer.
Very Orwellian. In 1984, that was the point of Newspeak - to make it impossible to express certain ideas.
Yes, but as the author of the article argues, the emoji icon of an eggplant has been culturally interpreted with a different semiotic meaning. The same could very well happen with the emoji icon of a watergun (despite the emoji’s semiotic shift), indicating a symbolic duplexity in the meaning of a handgun.
I.e., if you choose to mean a handgun when writing a watergun, the emoji’s meaning can change.
This very much reminds me of the CCP banning words online and then people coming up with new “synonyms” to bypass the ban, then that gets banned and new phrases words take its place and it goes on...
Not a valid comparison. The eggplant emoji might mean something other than eggplant, but if you change it to a watermelon you can’t even recognize it as the same symbol, let alone guess at the intended meaning. This is why it’s disturbing: it actively obscures interpretation.
Granted, I’m assuming historians will use the emoji set at time of writing, but that’s not trivially available.
The meaning of the words will change over time, but not the words themselves. So someone who reads it will know what the words written actually were, and just have to lookup any differences in meeting between when the words were written and now.
Imagine for a second if we took Shakespeare and rewrote it with modern day English, and then made the claim the new version is the original Shakespeare... I think we would see the problem with that. But that is what happened with emoji. It isn't that people look back, see as collections of pixels, and realize now those pixels mean water gun while in the past they meant firearm. When they look back, they see water gun.
2. the purpose of words is to communicate concepts, if the meaning of the word changes the word itself has changed, reducing a word to its mere orthography is nonsensical
Not of things already written down. The long S written in the Constitution is still there. It has not changed, and there would be outrage for anyone to go and change it. Changing the emoji from one meaning to another would be like changing the encoding of utf-8 so that a now means e and e means a, meaning that and and end flips in every utf-8 encoded file that is viewed.
Sure, but all of those are different than an admin at hacker news doing an
UPDATE posts SET text="I hate brown people" WHERE post_id=17560983
to make you look like a racist (or whatever they wanted to alter your comment to look as though you had written it). That type of editing doesn't naturally occur and is more like the type of changed meaning we're talking about here.
That's a completely different problem. Both translation and interpretation does not change the original text, only your interpretation of it. Messing with Unicode glyphs kinda does (well not if you go back to U+CODES, but nobody consumes texts this way).
Fonts and rendering and apps will change just like compilers and source and runtimes. aka bit rot.
---
Want to preserve your output? Then print to PDF with embedded fonts. Or use screenshots.
Want to be able to recreate your output? Then treat your content like devs treat their software.
I used to write prepress and print manufacturing software. I also did a tour of duty as our tech writer. Our team's entire publishing workflow got a lot more sane when I treated it like any other dev task.
Make dependencies explicit, use source control, pin down versions of apps, drivers, fonts, OSes, etc (aka colophon).
Our "build servers" even had VMware images, containing our desktop publishing apps, used to automate PostScript, PDF, and web output.
(This is long before Chef & Ansible, CI/CD, etc. Kids today have no idea how good they got it.)
> What kind of writing system allows people to change your words after you've written them?
East of Eden's third act is a whole debate about how to interpret "timshel" from the original bible into English, and how those interpretations have warped our thinking.
Plus... I'm amused at your use of "trash" in that way, given your horror of signifiers changing significance.
> There is plenty of free software that can give you pixel-level control over your output, you don't need to rely on the unicode consortium or any other organization of any kind to determine what you express.
... the whole point of having a writing system is having a standard writing system, at least de facto, and without the Unicode Consortium, there would be some other standards body because that's how computer software works. That other standards body would be worse than the Unicode Consortium by virtue of not being the Unicode Consortium, and therefore being either irrelevant or an agent which destroys cross-platform compatibility.
I like the english language and writing system, it is the most useful thing I know and I can easily read books from 200 years ago. Here is a 150 year old engineering text book that I can read with relative ease: https://archive.org/stream/manualofcivileng00rankuoft#page/8... . Emoji is a joke and is mainly used for decoration.
I agree regarding the Unicode Consortium, the reason I have that under "good news" is that the publication tools we have now are immensely better than what there was in the past, and we can overcome the limitations of reliance on anyone using existing tools. Even though there is a cost, the cost is lower than ever.
This isn't accurate. Writing systems excluding emoji are used to communicate linguistically. Emoji are not a linguistic phenomenon; they have semantics, but they have no syntax or pronunciation. That's why there's so much anxiety about the image a recipient sees matching the image you sent -- nobody cares if they send a message in one font and the recipient views it in a different font, because there is agreement on what an A is, what an f is, etc.
Compare the traditional Chinese character for "come", 來. This is a picture of a stalk of wheat, but people wanted to talk about coming, and they borrowed a word that sounded the same so they could write it down. "Wheat" was originally written this way too, but the concept of coming was so common that "wheat" was driven to a different character, 麥. This all works because the characters are being used to write a language rather than to free-associate based on some pictures which have no specified relationship to each other or anything else. Emoji do not fit in Unicode because they are not part of a writing system. They're a hack for sending image data without having to send the full image over the wire.
All languages are completely dependent on a set of words that have no semantic value at all, like the English word "of". Emoji do not support these, and if they did, they wouldn't be emoji.
Emoji is controlled by corporations that are concerned with maximizing the value of their platforms which will lead them to a PG13, disneyfied, milquetoast worldview.
I wouldn’t worry too much. People will combat this with creative workarounds, such as using the eggplant emoji to represent a penis.
Those arguing with you are clearly missing the point. Yes, language can evolve, but emoji are essentially variable expressions interpreted on read by the system reading them. Sure, the meaning of a given word can change over time such that a later reader misunderstands but this is like a blind person having someone read a novel aloud to him one year and the next the reader changes words arbitrarily.
Can we gather a list of all those who feel their messages involving the revolver emoji has been harmfully misinterpreted now that it's a water gun emoji? I think the damage of this could be far reaching
> What kind of writing system allows people to change your words after you've written them?
Er, this happens all the time, writing or not. So many words in the languages I speak fluently have changed meaning over hundreds of years -- especially in French!
This is not a bad thing, provided the rate of redefinition is low enough and that we record the changes so we can understand older writings.
That's a pretty different phenomenon that probably usually occurs much more slowly and not at the whim of a small number of powerful people/organizations.
No, it occurs at the whim of the people. I don't know the etymology of it, but I suspect that the "make-out" meaning of "embracer" in French was not a result of "powerful people/organizations" pushing it.
It seems to me that as long as emoji is kept out of serious and mass communications, the variability and imprecision of emoji is no big deal. We engage in imprecise expressions all the time like "urgh", "ew", "yay", and rely on more precise words to clarify the message when the situation calls for it. At the moment, emoji seems to be used in the same class as those imprecise interjections, and I don't see it acquiring technical, precise use anytime soon, given how unwieldy it is to use compared to the 26 characters.
So just as a ballet dance, or a particular performance of it, isn't the right medium for world leaders to express international political sentiment, similarly, emoji should not be expected to convey any precise sentiment in critical situations. The author says as much:
>If emoji are to become adequate vehicles for discussing public health, the legal system, and art, their depictions need to be molded by users rather than a handful of software companies.
I don't think anybody is seriously considering the use of emoji in the way in its current mode of usage for communication when precision is needed. In the first place, there is no standard pronunciation of emoji characters, which in itself is sufficent to make their use in formal documents an iffy suggestion. Arguably, if we ever standardize a reading/interpretation of emoji, the concern raised by the author becomes rendered moot and the choice of graphic representation becomes a stylistic one.
When we consider the current imprecise nature of emoji, message corruption due to companies somewhat altering the precise meaning of the emoji become much less significant.
This is an overblown/not new concern - emojis have always rendered according to the client platform, so you never knew if, for example, your :-D was going to be a big smile or a laugh to the recipient.
Part of the problem is that Google and Apple have a monopoly on this stuff. Not sure we can do anything about that readily, but we should probably at least acknowledge that it's a problem.
If we just assume that isn't going to change maybe we could adopt an app that has its own emoji representations separate from the operating system.
And/or maybe we need to start some political process working on the companies to improve their representations.
I think this is the tip of the iceberg and is more important than most people realize. Censorship is no joke.
While good writing and artwork undoubtably can express a far greater range of emotions than emoji—and with infinitely more subtlety—if you ask me how I’m feeling in casual conversation, 90% of the time I’ll reply “fine” or “ok” or “bad”. Being able to easily reply with one of 50 reaction emojis is a great improvement in expressiveness here.
Emoji do become problematic when you start asking follow up questions, such as “what does feeling ‘bad’ feel like?” Since you’ve already expressed your specific state when you replied with your first emoji, to add more depth you start having to combine reaction emoji to express something new or repurpose other emoji as symbols. Which sounds a lot like any language actually
A far more dangerous problem is that emoji can replace the idea of the things they are intended to represent. For example: the happiness emoji becomes our idea of what happiness is, instead of merely representing the concept of happiness. That seems to be what the article is driving at and it clearly would be bad if this widely happened. The result would be newspeak type language, incapable of expressing many ideas and that is controlled by these huge companies. Worse, using such a language, your subjective experience of life has to fit into the emoji standard because you lack the tools to express or even conceptualize anything beyond it.
Given the formation of an international committee and - most significantly - their adoption by parents, we can hope that we have reached peak emoji, and their decline will be rapid.
> Mosquitoes are the world’s deadliest animal — outpacing sharks, snakes and all others by a wide margin.
I do believe you have to specifically except humans from "animals", unless it was your intention to include us, in which case I do believe you are mistaken.
It is technically the malaria parasite (a protist) but that disease has killed the most humans throughout history - even without is collateral damage like making being a sickle cell anemia trait carrier good for survival historically.
> The argument for the mosquito emoji, made by the Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, was firmly rooted in public health. The proposal states, “For many parts of the world, the mosquito is more than a nuisance — it is also a danger. Mosquitoes are the world’s deadliest animal — outpacing sharks, snakes and all others by a wide margin.” A mosquito emoji will allow people to easily communicate about the deadly insect to populations of varying languages and literacy levels. This usefulness serves as a kind of inversion of the ways in which other serious or controversial issues are mitigated. Why try to cover up or deny the existence of “real” guns, which are as rampant (at least in the US) as other “object” emoji?
This highlights a YouTube policy that I found very disturbing. YouTube judged that graphic violence, defined somehow, was unacceptable and couldn't be shown on their platform. In particular, they didn't allow the posting of beheading videos featuring South American gangs beheading people who they thought deserved it. The reasoning was that allowing people to watch those videos served the gangs' purposes by inspiring fear.
But, YouTube made a special exception to their policy to allow beheading videos of ISIS beheading people who they thought deserved it. The reasoning was that allowing people to watch those videos carried the message "look how bad things are in Syria", a message that Google endorsed.
I can't for the life of me understand why the reason any particular person uploaded a video to YouTube should determine what I get out of the video. In my eyes, if YouTube was full of videos of gangs beheading informers, cops, and guys who slept with the boss's daughter, uploaded by the gangs themselves, that would be newsworthy and probably draw a lot of attention to the message "look how bad things are in South America". It's not like ISIS was ashamed of the beheading videos they filmed and released for propaganda purposes.
Unfortunately, I can't provide a link to substantiate my characterization of Google's policies; my source is an English-language interview between a former YouTube executive and a Chinese consultancy, which I was asked to help transcribe.
This article is a perfect example of how the crit lit genre often analyzes the shit out of a stool sample while ignoring the patient's sawed-off arm. (Usually missing the real point because an auxiliary one makes for a much cuter reference to some piece of literature authored c. 1800-1990.)
A set of images designed by advertising and consumer goods companies are not optimized for expressing the full range of the human experience? I'm shocked! /s
The real critique: we've had <img> since the 1990s, and plenty of more than usable chat systems/protocols/markup languages that allow inline images for about that long as well. Why are standardized emojis so popular, and why do people even give a fuck about them when there are obvious workable alternatives?
Emojis are not "radical" or "new", as the author puts it. They are a crippled instantiation of an old and obvious idea, an idea that has itself been implemented in better ways thousands of times prior to the rise of emojis.
The best part of this article is discovering "send me sfmoma"
> Text 572-51 with the words “send me” followed by a keyword, a color, or even an emoji and you’ll receive a related artwork image and caption via text message
> queries containing emoji whose colloquial meaning had diverged from their objective depiction, such as the infamous [eggplant emoji], left users unsatisfied.
Well but how is that different from how words have worked since the dawn of civilization? If tomorrow the collective society starts using the word kaleidoscope as an euphemism for penis, then any software that statically maps words to meanings will also fail. This is not a problem tied to emojis specifically.
Emojis are ephemeral, imprecise symbols which in the clients discussed are generally used for short term communication, not persistent information storage. Like the ASCII art they originated from, their implied meaning often doesn't survive font changes.
I wonder how many of the people apparently incandescent with rage at the "authoritarian nature" of vendors changing a gun to a water pistol to bring into line with other vendors had similar objections back when Microsoft changed their original scifi toy gun to a pistol back in 2016...
No more ephemeral than Chinese characters ever were (some were ephemeral, some durable). For example, the list of Kanji to be taught in Japan is updated periodically -- some characters are dropped, some are added. New Han/Kanji characters are invented occasionally -- it can be done because they are actually simplified drawings with one or more root characters and pen strokes added to distinguish them from other similar characters.
"When language is subjugated to corporate interests, we lose our ability to talk honestly and openly about the world, and some uncomfortable and disturbing juxtapositions emerge"
Adding new stuff to Unicode should have a delay, 20-25 years from proposal to the standard (roughly a generation).
In the meantime it's possible to insert emoji into text as smiley, -smiley-, :) , smiley.jpg, ::smiley:: or whatever you want and the system you use is free to change it into a picture.
We end up with standard that is full of ancient symbols from 2000-2025 and new generations of people will abandon them for something else when the culture changes.
Emoji from 80s:
________
/ "Ship Arriving Too Late to
/ Save a Drowning Witch"
/ /\ F. Zappa
I had been disturbed by the actions of platforms like Google for awhile, fearing that their naive efforts at maintaining "mass market appeal" in the most hamfisted and blind ways possible were going to have unintentional consequences for global human culture. Then I read Eric Schmidt's book 'The New Digital Age.' They are not naive. And the effects are not unintentional at all. Their goal isn't even mass-market appeal. They want to ossify human culture and lock it in place to what it was in the early 2000s when they first became successful. As multitudes in the past have done, upon attaining influence many in the tech crowd have concluded that they know better, and that the general public (of which they of course never count themselves a member) is not capable of the task of regulating their own culture. This is a pretty old viewpoint. It built the pyramids, united Rome, etc. It's old school Conservative thinking, where the needs of the nation (or cult or tribe or whatever) come first, and the individual exists solely to serve that. It requires the presence of 'special' people, typically incarnated gods, representatives chosen by a god, or somehow otherwise fundamentally 'Better' people, like a kings lineage.
That brand of thinking ruled the world for a long time, but it got its ass kicked basically completely around the end of the 18th century. I have no idea why the rich people at the top of tech companies seem to like it so much. But it's becoming increasingly clear that these systems of communication are enabling a greater level of control and there are some sick-minded powerful folks who will need to be reigned in as they are more than willing to take those reigns. No one should have those. Global culture can, and eventually will, guide itself.
Humanity is a wonderful species, but only in its totality. In the cut-down whitewashed conformal mass that Facebook and Google and others want to construct and sell to people, then try to force on the rest, it looks more like a metastatic infection. The tech companies are unquestionably at war with basic human nature. They do not like humans very much, and they want to change them. Like their forebearers in the Industrial Revolution, they seek to round off the rough edges, smooth out the wrinkles, and will wreak any amount of suffering necessary to do so. Engineers need to think very hard about the ethics of their work. "Just doing my job" holds exactly as much moral weight as "I just did it for money", so keep that in mind. It's an empty dodge.
187 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 217 ms ] threadSuch as? I thought "kitsch" perfectly summed up the essence of a restricted, infantilized worldview.
https://web.archive.org/web/20090328112312/http://www.wipp.e...
(original on energy.gov is gone)
- Emoji decoupled from Unicode, and represented as SVG by chat clients. This ensures our expression is not limited by the Unicode committee.
- Any user can upload a new emoji as SVG.
- Any user can download an emoji that appears in one of their messages, and place it in their own library.
- Emojis can also be downloaded from web-pages etc.
The other thing that Emoji have going for them is that they're text and can appear where text does, and for that to work I am pretty sure you need a Unicode Consortium.
It's been proposed!
http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2016/16105r-unicode-image-hash.pd...
Now think about us sitting here in 2018. Computer rendered text has been around for a while (ASCII, UTF, .doc, .html, etc.) In another 200 years, the way we transfer, encode, and view those formats will be completely perfected and probably unrecognizable to us. They will probably be ubiquitous in a way that seems completely alien to us now, and all of the implementation issues we worry about in 2018 will completely fade away (proprietary vs. open, security vulnerabilities, compatibility, accessibility, etc.).
With this in mind, being reluctant to add enrichment to how document transfer works seems like it's obviously on the wrong side of history.
Emojis are silly little pictograms. If you want something more varied, send an image or a gif or a meme. Or settle down and type out a few of these things we call words, that have the capability to be very expressive and unambiguous.
If you were to accept that emoji are an important part of modern communication, would you not agree that censoring certain images is akin to censoring words? Then, the reference to "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" is very apt.
I didn't get the impression that the article was suggesting that the people who vote in the Consortium have any sort of nefarious intensions -- and I don't think that there is much to be gained by a fascist government by censoring the word "shit". The decision to do stems from personal taste, prudence, or social pressure. It is not the intention behind it that we should be afraid of, but the power of some organizations to form our means of communication, independent on how "good" they are, as there are many unpredictable factors that can shape their decisions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji_domain
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2035572
An early example of this is http://xn--n3h.net/ or snowman in hat dot net (turns out hacker news strips unicode emoji.) Some browsers convert to punycode to reduce the incidence of phishing attacks based on homoglyphs (two characters that look the same).
An example of this already exists: in a Facebook comment, you can reply with an arbitrary meme, and I believe Slack lets you define emojis as well. We could extend this to include sound, or even modes for haptic or braille feedback. If there isn't space to attach the mode you could simply provide a URL.
This could be turned into a standard, and apps could implement the standard, allowing people to communicate with richer content across a wide array of technology.
The whole benefit of Unicode is that anyone anywhere can see Unicode on any device that supports it, without introducing added complexity of sending the actual image over the message.
It seems a lot more sensible to actually send the picture you want to send, or a link to that picture, because that doesn't need to be interpreted differently by each client... just rendered. Sending the actual image might take more space in, say, a text message, but its actual encoded size should be pretty trivial. For example, one of Twitter's 16x16 color emoji is a 400 byte SVG file. Base64-encoded that would be about 533 bytes. The standard could define the image formats accepted, with probably one ideal format for emoji (SVG) and another for memes (JPEG).
Here's another way to think of how you could implement this in a standard. Each message is multipart. The text body is the first message by default. That text can contain references to other parts. That reference could be the name of the part you want to reference in that message, and that name would only need to be unique to that message. But that name could also be, for example, a SHA hash. When you accept messages, you could store the message parts in a database with their SHA hash. When someone sends the same part again in a new message, you can just retrieve that part from your database, rather than storing the same part multiple times. This could allow you to send messages referencing the same gigantic meme file 50 times, but you only ever store it the one time, and after that you just store references to it. The standard would allow you to simply say "please reference part X in this part of the message text, and if you don't have that part yet, here it is, base64-encoded or linked via URL".
(What I just described is MIME, but you could reinvent it if you wanted people to adopt it, because people don't like adopting things that aren't new and cool)
Nonsensical garbage. The Arrows, Technical, Box Drawing, Block Elements, Geometric Shapes and Miscellaneous Symbols blocks were all part of Unicode 1.0.
> It seems a lot more sensible to actually send the picture you want to send, or a link to that picture, because that doesn't need to be interpreted differently by each client... just rendered.
1. Except now you need to design a way to design and render mixed content.
2. If that's your argument, why even have letters and fonts? Just send the right images.
Apps already have ways to render mixed content. How do you think you can see both text and pictures next to each other? E-mail has supported this for decades. The linked article even explicitly mentions how different apps render different image sets for the same emojis.
We have different fonts for several reasons, and sometimes we do send entire fonts in order to render our messages correctly. What font you use, and how you choose to render graphemes, is completely up to the application. What I'm proposing is a more interoperable way of sharing mixed content, which people clearly already want to do.
HTML, MMS, whatever.
Besides, at least as far as Discord/Slack goes, most people I've found just upload their own little emoticons as they are more meaningful and great for inside jokes on a particular server/team.
Incompleteness is manifestly NOT a problem for an ideographic script.
[1] http://www.unicode.org/emoji/emoji-requests.html
- They changed the gun emoji to be a water gun, which has a totally different meaning. This retroactively changes previous writings, changing their meaning. What kind of writing system allows people to change your words after you've written them? Emoji is a trash writing system and an agent of kipplization.
- Emoji is controlled by corporations that are concerned with maximizing the value of their platforms which will lead them to a PG13, disneyfied, milquetoast worldview.
The good news:
- In the entire human history, it has never been easier to create and publish text, audio, or video works of any kind. The most popular platforms have severe limitations, but it only takes the slightest effort to use other platforms that are uncensored.
- There is plenty of free software that can give you pixel-level control over your output, you don't need to rely on the unicode consortium or any other organization of any kind to determine what you express.
From the op:
In his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera linked this kind of forced conformity to a fascist government’s unbounded desire for control, and its efforts to limit expression to kitsch, a cartoonish denial of objective reality
This is also a historical feature of communist governments. All governments, and all societies, in as much as they lose a commitment to individual rights, will tend to grab more and more control in pursuit of difficult goals. It's yet another thing that seems "nice" but which has disturbing implications under the surface for free speech, like Canadian Bill C-16.
Of course, that doesn't make for a good ingredient in angry epithets.
Corporations certainly have purges. Happens all the time after mergers.
Both are authoritarian political philosophies with a heavy handed approach to economic policies.
Differences come in privatization, immigration, equality of rights, and religious toleration. [1]
Both have extreme takes on ideas falling under the umbrella of socialist thought (hence, Germany's National Socialist Workers party). You can argue 1984 vs Brave New World, but there are certainly common themes.
Both differ significantly from classical liberalism.
[1] http://www.differencebetween.net/miscellaneous/politics/ideo...
File this away under "myths programmers believe about language," with some bullet points like,
- A word or symbol will always have one meaning.
- Okay, but at least those meanings will stay the same over the next decade.
- The next year?!
Words change meaning because your present-eyes are different from past-eyes.
The gun symbol has changed meaning because your present client is different from past clients.
In my opinion if the people that changed the gun emoji had done it by introducing a new watergun emoji, replaced the gun with watergun on the keyboards, and declined to make their devices capable of emitting the sequence of bytes representing the gun, I would have been fine with that, and for their preening purposes I think that would have been sufficient. I'd consider that annoying and rude, but not malicious. If you have a unicode text file with the gun emoji, and you don't know when it was written, you genuinely can't tell what the author wrote as a symbol, even ignoring all the complexities of language, almost as if the word was blurred, and you can't tell between two possibilities.
Any kind of writing system allows this. Translation changes the words, and can change meaning. People can mis-quote. And yes, over time, meanings of words change, as do the cultural contexts from which they came. None of this is unique to emojis.
The truth is that all communication has at least two parties, and there is never a guarantee that the receiver will get the message as intended. Even if you do craft "pixel-perfect" emojis, people still can (and likely will) mis-understand the nuances of your intended message.
In the case of emoji, we're aceepting the idea that when I said gun, I in fact did not say gun, I said water gun. You can interpret the water gun as gun or water gun, but really I never said gun
this comment could be interpreted as a threat 50 years down the line, by the change of meaning over time, but any sane person understanding that history and context matter, with knowledge of how it would be interpreted today, would realize its not. But if we applied the same acceptance to text as we do with emoji, the whole thing could be changed such that in both this time, and 50 years from now, it would be interpreted as a threat. The same context argument could apply, but I'm also sure defenders of the change would also not see the need to maintain a log of how things have been changed, as I doubt they care about emoji changes today.
The words themselves aren't simply appearing differently; they're changing, right from under my feet. The only defense is that (afaik) the unicode assortium has not changed yet changed the naming for it (ie CRYING FACE EMOJI), but since no one in practice refers to that definition, its not a useful defense.
Thus, emoji in their current form are highly inappropriate as a medium of communication, except in the very limited use case of short-lived, impermanent, and same-implementation communications.
But since this constraint is not the intention of the unicode consortium, and this is not the intention of the groups/font-creators that support emoji, and this is not a limitation that the general user expects, then this is a very poor design.
Emojis have been accepted as intentionally corruptible communications, but no party involved actually realizes the implications of it. We don't change ascii (ignoring the latter 127 characters, which are open to any interpretation) except by accident and by intentional non-meaningful changes (changing fonts does not change the characters themselves, just their aesthetics [except I guess wingbats]), and everyone would throw a fit if they did, because the notion is absurd
When "pistol" changed to mean "toy gun", it (1) happened in two years and (2) was decided by an oligarchy of actors (and not even the Unicode Consortium oligarchy).
Can you spot the difference?
Think of the word "gun". The image that entered your mind just now was not a water gun. It was a weapon, the kind of device the gun emoji used to depict and now no longer does.
The people forcing this kind of change want you to associate the concept of a gun with a water gun or other toy, and they think that by changing your though pattern this way, they'll make society safer.
This is terrifying and totalitarian idea. Once you buy into the idea that you can force a change to the language to achieve your desired social aims, there's no intrusion into private life that you will be unable to justify.
Very Orwellian. In 1984, that was the point of Newspeak - to make it impossible to express certain ideas.
I.e., if you choose to mean a handgun when writing a watergun, the emoji’s meaning can change.
Anyone born in the last dozen or so years.
Granted, I’m assuming historians will use the emoji set at time of writing, but that’s not trivially available.
The meaning of the words will change over time, but not the words themselves. So someone who reads it will know what the words written actually were, and just have to lookup any differences in meeting between when the words were written and now.
Imagine for a second if we took Shakespeare and rewrote it with modern day English, and then made the claim the new version is the original Shakespeare... I think we would see the problem with that. But that is what happened with emoji. It isn't that people look back, see as collections of pixels, and realize now those pixels mean water gun while in the past they meant firearm. When they look back, they see water gun.
1. orthography also changes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s)
2. the purpose of words is to communicate concepts, if the meaning of the word changes the word itself has changed, reducing a word to its mere orthography is nonsensical
Not of things already written down. The long S written in the Constitution is still there. It has not changed, and there would be outrage for anyone to go and change it. Changing the emoji from one meaning to another would be like changing the encoding of utf-8 so that a now means e and e means a, meaning that and and end flips in every utf-8 encoded file that is viewed.
Fonts and rendering and apps will change just like compilers and source and runtimes. aka bit rot.
---
Want to preserve your output? Then print to PDF with embedded fonts. Or use screenshots.
Want to be able to recreate your output? Then treat your content like devs treat their software.
I used to write prepress and print manufacturing software. I also did a tour of duty as our tech writer. Our team's entire publishing workflow got a lot more sane when I treated it like any other dev task.
Make dependencies explicit, use source control, pin down versions of apps, drivers, fonts, OSes, etc (aka colophon).
Our "build servers" even had VMware images, containing our desktop publishing apps, used to automate PostScript, PDF, and web output.
(This is long before Chef & Ansible, CI/CD, etc. Kids today have no idea how good they got it.)
The kind that gave us this: https://i.imgur.com/pfkBj1D.jpg Edit: Turns out this one's a photoshop
or this: http://jokeindex.com/images/batman/batman06.jpg
https://steemitimages.com/DQmbiPZbjmskYPjMc2FuSGV4AcfDwjsNt6...
It's still pretty common. Dyck Insurance was just running radio ads a couple years ago with the slogan "Everybody loves Dyck".
East of Eden's third act is a whole debate about how to interpret "timshel" from the original bible into English, and how those interpretations have warped our thinking.
No more trash than any other.
Plus... I'm amused at your use of "trash" in that way, given your horror of signifiers changing significance.
> There is plenty of free software that can give you pixel-level control over your output, you don't need to rely on the unicode consortium or any other organization of any kind to determine what you express.
... the whole point of having a writing system is having a standard writing system, at least de facto, and without the Unicode Consortium, there would be some other standards body because that's how computer software works. That other standards body would be worse than the Unicode Consortium by virtue of not being the Unicode Consortium, and therefore being either irrelevant or an agent which destroys cross-platform compatibility.
I agree regarding the Unicode Consortium, the reason I have that under "good news" is that the publication tools we have now are immensely better than what there was in the past, and we can overcome the limitations of reliance on anyone using existing tools. Even though there is a cost, the cost is lower than ever.
> No more trash than any other.
This isn't accurate. Writing systems excluding emoji are used to communicate linguistically. Emoji are not a linguistic phenomenon; they have semantics, but they have no syntax or pronunciation. That's why there's so much anxiety about the image a recipient sees matching the image you sent -- nobody cares if they send a message in one font and the recipient views it in a different font, because there is agreement on what an A is, what an f is, etc.
Compare the traditional Chinese character for "come", 來. This is a picture of a stalk of wheat, but people wanted to talk about coming, and they borrowed a word that sounded the same so they could write it down. "Wheat" was originally written this way too, but the concept of coming was so common that "wheat" was driven to a different character, 麥. This all works because the characters are being used to write a language rather than to free-associate based on some pictures which have no specified relationship to each other or anything else. Emoji do not fit in Unicode because they are not part of a writing system. They're a hack for sending image data without having to send the full image over the wire.
All languages are completely dependent on a set of words that have no semantic value at all, like the English word "of". Emoji do not support these, and if they did, they wouldn't be emoji.
I wouldn’t worry too much. People will combat this with creative workarounds, such as using the eggplant emoji to represent a penis.
I read this as "Emoji is a recycling bin writing system"
Er, this happens all the time, writing or not. So many words in the languages I speak fluently have changed meaning over hundreds of years -- especially in French!
This is not a bad thing, provided the rate of redefinition is low enough and that we record the changes so we can understand older writings.
So just as a ballet dance, or a particular performance of it, isn't the right medium for world leaders to express international political sentiment, similarly, emoji should not be expected to convey any precise sentiment in critical situations. The author says as much:
>If emoji are to become adequate vehicles for discussing public health, the legal system, and art, their depictions need to be molded by users rather than a handful of software companies.
I don't think anybody is seriously considering the use of emoji in the way in its current mode of usage for communication when precision is needed. In the first place, there is no standard pronunciation of emoji characters, which in itself is sufficent to make their use in formal documents an iffy suggestion. Arguably, if we ever standardize a reading/interpretation of emoji, the concern raised by the author becomes rendered moot and the choice of graphic representation becomes a stylistic one.
When we consider the current imprecise nature of emoji, message corruption due to companies somewhat altering the precise meaning of the emoji become much less significant.
This is an overblown/not new concern - emojis have always rendered according to the client platform, so you never knew if, for example, your :-D was going to be a big smile or a laugh to the recipient.
Ever heard of this book called The Bible? People have been changing the meaning of stuff in there for thousands of years.
If we just assume that isn't going to change maybe we could adopt an app that has its own emoji representations separate from the operating system.
And/or maybe we need to start some political process working on the companies to improve their representations.
I think this is the tip of the iceberg and is more important than most people realize. Censorship is no joke.
Emoji do become problematic when you start asking follow up questions, such as “what does feeling ‘bad’ feel like?” Since you’ve already expressed your specific state when you replied with your first emoji, to add more depth you start having to combine reaction emoji to express something new or repurpose other emoji as symbols. Which sounds a lot like any language actually
A far more dangerous problem is that emoji can replace the idea of the things they are intended to represent. For example: the happiness emoji becomes our idea of what happiness is, instead of merely representing the concept of happiness. That seems to be what the article is driving at and it clearly would be bad if this widely happened. The result would be newspeak type language, incapable of expressing many ideas and that is controlled by these huge companies. Worse, using such a language, your subjective experience of life has to fit into the emoji standard because you lack the tools to express or even conceptualize anything beyond it.
Some things are too essential to discard for this reason.
What will change is what emojis are used and how. The rare ones which are not used by parents will become used by kids. I already see this.
I do believe you have to specifically except humans from "animals", unless it was your intention to include us, in which case I do believe you are mistaken.
So yes they very much deserve the title.
This highlights a YouTube policy that I found very disturbing. YouTube judged that graphic violence, defined somehow, was unacceptable and couldn't be shown on their platform. In particular, they didn't allow the posting of beheading videos featuring South American gangs beheading people who they thought deserved it. The reasoning was that allowing people to watch those videos served the gangs' purposes by inspiring fear.
But, YouTube made a special exception to their policy to allow beheading videos of ISIS beheading people who they thought deserved it. The reasoning was that allowing people to watch those videos carried the message "look how bad things are in Syria", a message that Google endorsed.
I can't for the life of me understand why the reason any particular person uploaded a video to YouTube should determine what I get out of the video. In my eyes, if YouTube was full of videos of gangs beheading informers, cops, and guys who slept with the boss's daughter, uploaded by the gangs themselves, that would be newsworthy and probably draw a lot of attention to the message "look how bad things are in South America". It's not like ISIS was ashamed of the beheading videos they filmed and released for propaganda purposes.
Unfortunately, I can't provide a link to substantiate my characterization of Google's policies; my source is an English-language interview between a former YouTube executive and a Chinese consultancy, which I was asked to help transcribe.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/mar/01/marine-le-pen-...
A set of images designed by advertising and consumer goods companies are not optimized for expressing the full range of the human experience? I'm shocked! /s
The real critique: we've had <img> since the 1990s, and plenty of more than usable chat systems/protocols/markup languages that allow inline images for about that long as well. Why are standardized emojis so popular, and why do people even give a fuck about them when there are obvious workable alternatives?
Emojis are not "radical" or "new", as the author puts it. They are a crippled instantiation of an old and obvious idea, an idea that has itself been implemented in better ways thousands of times prior to the rise of emojis.
> Text 572-51 with the words “send me” followed by a keyword, a color, or even an emoji and you’ll receive a related artwork image and caption via text message
Stuff like this makes me happy for technology
[0] https://photos.app.goo.gl/w9kPRwUr2UHNQoKa8
Well but how is that different from how words have worked since the dawn of civilization? If tomorrow the collective society starts using the word kaleidoscope as an euphemism for penis, then any software that statically maps words to meanings will also fail. This is not a problem tied to emojis specifically.
I wonder how many of the people apparently incandescent with rage at the "authoritarian nature" of vendors changing a gun to a water pistol to bring into line with other vendors had similar objections back when Microsoft changed their original scifi toy gun to a pistol back in 2016...
:-(
;-)
Did I miss any?
Edit: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sef/sefSmiley.htm
Great quote
"He brought a squirt gun to the birthday party."
Clear enough?
In the meantime it's possible to insert emoji into text as smiley, -smiley-, :) , smiley.jpg, ::smiley:: or whatever you want and the system you use is free to change it into a picture.
We end up with standard that is full of ancient symbols from 2000-2025 and new generations of people will abandon them for something else when the culture changes.
Emoji from 80s:
That brand of thinking ruled the world for a long time, but it got its ass kicked basically completely around the end of the 18th century. I have no idea why the rich people at the top of tech companies seem to like it so much. But it's becoming increasingly clear that these systems of communication are enabling a greater level of control and there are some sick-minded powerful folks who will need to be reigned in as they are more than willing to take those reigns. No one should have those. Global culture can, and eventually will, guide itself.
Humanity is a wonderful species, but only in its totality. In the cut-down whitewashed conformal mass that Facebook and Google and others want to construct and sell to people, then try to force on the rest, it looks more like a metastatic infection. The tech companies are unquestionably at war with basic human nature. They do not like humans very much, and they want to change them. Like their forebearers in the Industrial Revolution, they seek to round off the rough edges, smooth out the wrinkles, and will wreak any amount of suffering necessary to do so. Engineers need to think very hard about the ethics of their work. "Just doing my job" holds exactly as much moral weight as "I just did it for money", so keep that in mind. It's an empty dodge.