8 ms·

Why the Emoji Was Inevitable (2017)

16 points by dnetesn 7y ago

jhbadger 7y ago
I get that sometimes some sign of emotion needs to be expressed in text, but there were ways of doing that before emojis existed. We had smileys like :-), ;-) and :-(. And tags like <sarcasm></sarcasm>.
- kylek 7y ago
  I think I've finally made peace with emojis. However, automatic conversion from smilies to emojies still drives me nuts >:|
  - frou_dh 7y ago
    This reminds me of a misconception a lot of people seem to have about Markdown. It's not "wrong" to present it to readers verbatim (i.e. not rendered to HTML), since Markdown is a codification of existing plaintext conventions, and was designed to look good verbatim. In other words, though it is often used for, it is not solely a vehicle for generating HTML.
  - zeta0134 7y ago
    This is the main thing that drives me nuts. I'm fine with emoji, I'll even use them on purpose from time to time, but please let me decide when and how. There's nothing more infuriating than a computer replacing something I just typed with something its developer thought was better.
    - MrEldritch 7y ago
      I had to immediately turn off emoji conversion on Discord, because not only was it annoying, it was wrong - :) was invariably replaced with something that was very definitely the emoji equivalent of :D, and :D turned into what was unmistakably XD. These are very different!!
- WilliamEdward 7y ago
  I'm not sure if you're trying to say these crude emotes were good enough for expressing emotion and we didn't need emoji, but they're really not.
  - Mordisquitos 7y ago
    Personally I believe that they are better than emoji precisely due to their crudeness. I can use ":-)" to punctuate a joke, lower the tension in a critical message, or react to a cute picture. In each of these contexts, the smiley gets translated to different reactions which are still the property of me and the person I'm communicating with, particularly if we know each other in person. By using the plain ":-)" I am expressing my own sense of humour, my own way of being tactful, or my own way of smiling at a cute cat precisely because the smiley is so abstract. Alternatively, when I see one of my friends using ":-)", I will picture their own expressions, their own faces. However, now with emojis, we are subject to the preferences of arbitrary designers and UX teams working for Apple, Facebook, Google, etc. and the latest trends in the small circle of trendsetters who have any influence. Each reaction has its own emoji or limited range of emojis, and the way of expressing playfulness, empathy, or reaction to cuteness has become commodified and standardised in sets of childish faces which have also become saturated by their overuse in marketing. I am expected to no longer express shock with ":-o", but with an overreacting Munch-scream-lookalike. Laughing now comes in pre-ordained grades, with anything less than "sideways with tears" seen as understated. In summary, I feel that by being expected to chose between a pre-ordained set of designed smileys we are oursourcing our emotional range.
    - WilliamEdward 7y ago
      You're not being expected to do anything, those who can use emojis effectively are free to do so, those who believe a smaller set of emotions work better are free to use them instead. Society is not being poisoned by the mere existence of emojis.
- hrktb 7y ago
  There was incredible amount of stuff you could do in text, like ･゜ﾟ･:.｡..｡.:･'(ﾟ▽ﾟ)'･:.｡. .｡.:･゜ﾟ･. or ε=ε=ε=ε=ε=ε=┌(;￣◇￣)┘ And people started to have auto pasted ascii art. That’s the point where emoji is a more concise, explicit and less cumbersome system. We should see emoji as standardization and putting a business tie on chaotic expressions to pass them down the line in a limited amount of bytes.
phoe-krk 7y ago
Emoji are inevitable because text - the basic communication medium on the Internet - is a very poor medium for conveying emotions. That's why first emoticons, and then emoji - the modern pictograms - happened.
- c3534l 7y ago
  Writers have relied on their words only to convey emotions for a very long time. It's only recently that we've been drawing faces next to our words instead picking good ones.
  - nafeydev 7y ago
    Well the mobile keyboard does not allow you to express yourself in great detail.
    - chiph 7y ago
      So you just litter your desk with about a dozen emoji-ized keyboards like Tom Scott did (as a stunt) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3AtBE9BOvvk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3AtBE9BOvvk
  - WilliamEdward 7y ago
    Because writers invest time into using the right words especially since they're going to be published somewhere. You can surely see the difference between this and texting, which is supposed to be quick.
  - phoe-krk 7y ago
    Most people on the Internet aren't writers, and don't want to spend long minutes of reading text to get an emotional reaction that they can get in an eyeblink by looking at an emoticon. Literary expression of emotion isn't something easily comparable to emoji.
    - papito 7y ago
      Eh, I could just write [wink], or [SAD FACE].
coldtea 7y ago
Now, instead or in addition to the BS dozens of emoji they put in Unicode/system fonts every year for the last decade, can we get them to add the powerline glyphs?
- big_chungus 7y ago
  In the mean time, this is a good alternative which I've used: https://github.com/ryanoasis/nerd-fonts https://github.com/ryanoasis/nerd-fonts But no, they won't add them, because God forbid they actually do something useful. It's obviously more important they add five different skin tones... still don't understand what was wrong with generic yellow. Not everything has to be politicized.
  - jodrellblank 7y ago
    > still don't understand what was wrong with generic yellow. What race is Homer Simpson? (Casual normal person answer, not nitpicking, please). If you can answer that, you have all the information you need to understand.
    - coldtea 7y ago
      >What race is Homer Simpson? Indiscriminate. Homer's race is only assumed white not because of his yellow color, but because of his other life circumstances and stereotypes used in the show. The whole global culture is not beholden to Simpsons, so that "what race Homer is -> that means Homer's color denotes that race for everybody". There are comics in black/latino/asian dominant countries where the heroes (if the comics are not realistic, like Marvel) are all kinds of shades, yellow, green, pink, red, brown, white, etc and are still supposed to represent black/latino/asian etc folks. (And nobody ever considered Mickey Mouse black, despite having a black body). >If you can answer that, you have all the information you need to understand. Not really. If anything, the additional shades in the emojis give people more power to discriminate, focus on skin color, and be insensitive...
      - jodrellblank 7y ago
goatinaboat 7y ago
Back in the day emoticons/emojis/whatever were just bright yellow cartoons. No race, no gender. It was fine. Combined with ASCII text it was pure communication unfettered by any prejudice. Then like everything else on the internet it all became weirdly political almost overnight :-/
- tokai 7y ago
  I wouldn't say everything was all fine with the yellow smiley face. It's was somewhat associated with rave culture. I had a teacher in the early 90's that hated the smiley face, because he connected it with ecstasy.
- WilliamEdward 7y ago
  How exactly are differently coloured emojis political or prejudiced?
  - goatinaboat 7y ago
    Slack wants to know my “skin tone”. Why does that matter in a technical discussion? Would it matter in a real meeting or an interview even? It’s only there because some people want to make it matter. I just use the default yellow.
    - dragonwriter 7y ago
      > Slack wants to know my “skin tone”. Why does that matter in a technical discussion? Slack isn't just for technical discussions. > Would it matter in a real meeting or an interview even? Almost certainly, yes, whether or not it should. > It’s only there because some people want to make it matter. More accurately, it's only there because it does, in fact, matter to some people. But that's true of every way of expressing any difference of meaning in any communication medium.
blululu 7y ago
In retrospect anything is inevitable. Without Apple trying to sell phones in Japan on Softbank’s network on an OS built to play mp3s it seems unlikely that people would have hacked the Unicode spec to draw smiley faces. That said rich text is the future - hence html.
- gumby 7y ago
  Emojis far predated the iphone, much less its introduction in Japan, hence the global use of the Japanese term. As for the Unicode issue: each phone network (and some of the pre-phone Japanese computers) used different code points and had different sets of emojis. Also is iOS really "an OS designed to play mp3s?" it isn't the iPod's simple OS and really was a version of OS X.
cat199 7y ago
inevitable, perhaps, but invented long before most people were on the internet (or even born): Here's AP from 12 years ago talking about the 25th anniversary of the 'smiley': https://oklahoman.com/article/3128522/digital-smiley-face-turns-25 https://oklahoman.com/article/3128522/digital-smiley-face-tu...
OnlyRepliesToBS 7y ago
babel, the characterset

16 points by dnetesn 7y ago

I get that sometimes some sign of emotion needs to be expressed in text, but there were ways of doing that before emojis existed. We had smileys like :-), ;-) and :-(. And tags like <sarcasm></sarcasm>.

kylek 7y ago
I think I've finally made peace with emojis. However, automatic conversion from smilies to emojies still drives me nuts >:|
- frou_dh 7y ago
  This reminds me of a misconception a lot of people seem to have about Markdown. It's not "wrong" to present it to readers verbatim (i.e. not rendered to HTML), since Markdown is a codification of existing plaintext conventions, and was designed to look good verbatim. In other words, though it is often used for, it is not solely a vehicle for generating HTML.
- zeta0134 7y ago
  This is the main thing that drives me nuts. I'm fine with emoji, I'll even use them on purpose from time to time, but please let me decide when and how. There's nothing more infuriating than a computer replacing something I just typed with something its developer thought was better.
  - MrEldritch 7y ago
    I had to immediately turn off emoji conversion on Discord, because not only was it annoying, it was wrong - :) was invariably replaced with something that was very definitely the emoji equivalent of :D, and :D turned into what was unmistakably XD. These are very different!!
WilliamEdward 7y ago
I'm not sure if you're trying to say these crude emotes were good enough for expressing emotion and we didn't need emoji, but they're really not.
- Mordisquitos 7y ago
  Personally I believe that they are better than emoji precisely due to their crudeness. I can use ":-)" to punctuate a joke, lower the tension in a critical message, or react to a cute picture. In each of these contexts, the smiley gets translated to different reactions which are still the property of me and the person I'm communicating with, particularly if we know each other in person. By using the plain ":-)" I am expressing my own sense of humour, my own way of being tactful, or my own way of smiling at a cute cat precisely because the smiley is so abstract. Alternatively, when I see one of my friends using ":-)", I will picture their own expressions, their own faces. However, now with emojis, we are subject to the preferences of arbitrary designers and UX teams working for Apple, Facebook, Google, etc. and the latest trends in the small circle of trendsetters who have any influence. Each reaction has its own emoji or limited range of emojis, and the way of expressing playfulness, empathy, or reaction to cuteness has become commodified and standardised in sets of childish faces which have also become saturated by their overuse in marketing. I am expected to no longer express shock with ":-o", but with an overreacting Munch-scream-lookalike. Laughing now comes in pre-ordained grades, with anything less than "sideways with tears" seen as understated. In summary, I feel that by being expected to chose between a pre-ordained set of designed smileys we are oursourcing our emotional range.
  - WilliamEdward 7y ago
    You're not being expected to do anything, those who can use emojis effectively are free to do so, those who believe a smaller set of emotions work better are free to use them instead. Society is not being poisoned by the mere existence of emojis.
hrktb 7y ago
There was incredible amount of stuff you could do in text, like ･゜ﾟ･:.｡..｡.:･'(ﾟ▽ﾟ)'･:.｡. .｡.:･゜ﾟ･. or ε=ε=ε=ε=ε=ε=┌(;￣◇￣)┘ And people started to have auto pasted ascii art. That’s the point where emoji is a more concise, explicit and less cumbersome system. We should see emoji as standardization and putting a business tie on chaotic expressions to pass them down the line in a limited amount of bytes.

phoe-krk 7y ago

Emoji are inevitable because text - the basic communication medium on the Internet - is a very poor medium for conveying emotions. That's why first emoticons, and then emoji - the modern pictograms - happened.

c3534l 7y ago
Writers have relied on their words only to convey emotions for a very long time. It's only recently that we've been drawing faces next to our words instead picking good ones.
- nafeydev 7y ago
  Well the mobile keyboard does not allow you to express yourself in great detail.
  - chiph 7y ago
    So you just litter your desk with about a dozen emoji-ized keyboards like Tom Scott did (as a stunt) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3AtBE9BOvvk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3AtBE9BOvvk
- WilliamEdward 7y ago
  Because writers invest time into using the right words especially since they're going to be published somewhere. You can surely see the difference between this and texting, which is supposed to be quick.
- phoe-krk 7y ago
  Most people on the Internet aren't writers, and don't want to spend long minutes of reading text to get an emotional reaction that they can get in an eyeblink by looking at an emoticon. Literary expression of emotion isn't something easily comparable to emoji.
  - papito 7y ago
    Eh, I could just write [wink], or [SAD FACE].

coldtea 7y ago

Now, instead or in addition to the BS dozens of emoji they put in Unicode/system fonts every year for the last decade, can we get them to add the powerline glyphs?

big_chungus 7y ago
In the mean time, this is a good alternative which I've used: https://github.com/ryanoasis/nerd-fonts https://github.com/ryanoasis/nerd-fonts But no, they won't add them, because God forbid they actually do something useful. It's obviously more important they add five different skin tones... still don't understand what was wrong with generic yellow. Not everything has to be politicized.
- jodrellblank 7y ago
  > still don't understand what was wrong with generic yellow. What race is Homer Simpson? (Casual normal person answer, not nitpicking, please). If you can answer that, you have all the information you need to understand.
  - coldtea 7y ago
    >What race is Homer Simpson? Indiscriminate. Homer's race is only assumed white not because of his yellow color, but because of his other life circumstances and stereotypes used in the show. The whole global culture is not beholden to Simpsons, so that "what race Homer is -> that means Homer's color denotes that race for everybody". There are comics in black/latino/asian dominant countries where the heroes (if the comics are not realistic, like Marvel) are all kinds of shades, yellow, green, pink, red, brown, white, etc and are still supposed to represent black/latino/asian etc folks. (And nobody ever considered Mickey Mouse black, despite having a black body). >If you can answer that, you have all the information you need to understand. Not really. If anything, the additional shades in the emojis give people more power to discriminate, focus on skin color, and be insensitive...
    - jodrellblank 7y ago

goatinaboat 7y ago

Back in the day emoticons/emojis/whatever were just bright yellow cartoons. No race, no gender. It was fine. Combined with ASCII text it was pure communication unfettered by any prejudice. Then like everything else on the internet it all became weirdly political almost overnight :-/

tokai 7y ago
I wouldn't say everything was all fine with the yellow smiley face. It's was somewhat associated with rave culture. I had a teacher in the early 90's that hated the smiley face, because he connected it with ecstasy.
WilliamEdward 7y ago
How exactly are differently coloured emojis political or prejudiced?
- goatinaboat 7y ago
  Slack wants to know my “skin tone”. Why does that matter in a technical discussion? Would it matter in a real meeting or an interview even? It’s only there because some people want to make it matter. I just use the default yellow.
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
    > Slack wants to know my “skin tone”. Why does that matter in a technical discussion? Slack isn't just for technical discussions. > Would it matter in a real meeting or an interview even? Almost certainly, yes, whether or not it should. > It’s only there because some people want to make it matter. More accurately, it's only there because it does, in fact, matter to some people. But that's true of every way of expressing any difference of meaning in any communication medium.

blululu 7y ago

In retrospect anything is inevitable. Without Apple trying to sell phones in Japan on Softbank’s network on an OS built to play mp3s it seems unlikely that people would have hacked the Unicode spec to draw smiley faces. That said rich text is the future - hence html.

gumby 7y ago
Emojis far predated the iphone, much less its introduction in Japan, hence the global use of the Japanese term. As for the Unicode issue: each phone network (and some of the pre-phone Japanese computers) used different code points and had different sets of emojis. Also is iOS really "an OS designed to play mp3s?" it isn't the iPod's simple OS and really was a version of OS X.

cat199 7y ago

inevitable, perhaps, but invented long before most people were on the internet (or even born): Here's AP from 12 years ago talking about the 25th anniversary of the 'smiley': https://oklahoman.com/article/3128522/digital-smiley-face-turns-25 https://oklahoman.com/article/3128522/digital-smiley-face-tu...

OnlyRepliesToBS 7y ago

babel, the characterset