![]() ![]() The language we use in tech is just as important as that coming from our mouths, or our hands It can take two years for submitted emoji proposals to be accepted and completed, and there is often a public clamour for new additions. This is why the subjects of the “two dancing girls” emoji look so pleased. The emoji-accepting process is not simple – it’s basically the emoji equivalent of winning a place at Oxbridge. Particularly interesting is the way in which emojis are approved, which is by an industry body called the Unicode Consortium I like to imagine its members as a bunch of normal-looking suits sitting around a table – except they all have giant yellow heads and love hearts for eyes. (Emojis are distinctly rendered by developers, which is why, say, an apple will look different on Twitter than on a rival platform or device.) Kurita’s initial collection of 176 images has since been acquired by New York’s Museum of Modern Art.) I first encountered them in 2011, when the latest Apple iPhone operating system offered an emoji keyboard – Android devices followed two years later. (Their actual genesis goes back to 1999, courtesy of Japanese artist Shigetaka Kurita, and their use was first popularised in Japan. (This was noted in the court ruling.) In some regions such as in the Middle East a thumbs-up can be offensive.Ī child of emoticons :-) – that’s an emoticon – emojis seemed, bless, fresh and exciting to me when they arrived in the mainstream. A thumbs-up emoji, to take the example from the Canadian case, can, just as in offline life, be used sarcastically. This is true of all language of course – and emojis are a type of language, despite what the likes of John Humphrys et al have sneered in the past. ![]() This is because emojis – as many unfortunates have discovered (often gen X parents, but that I, a millennial in her early 30s, am increasingly, devastatingly, discovering) – do not always have clearcut meanings. In Ohio, a judgment in a harassment case queried what, exactly, the rat emoji meant in that context. In 2014, a Michigan court tried a defamation case involving a stuck-out tongue emoticon (rendered as :-p). There are more examples of emojis finding their way before the bench. But the thing that caught my eye last week was a Canadian court decision that ruled a thumbs-up emoji is legally permissible as contract assent. Meanwhile, Elon Musk is, in addition to challenging Mark Zuckerberg to a cage fight and a literal penis-measuring competition, threatening to sue the head of Meta over the company’s Twitter clone, Threads. In recent times we’ve had, rather gloriously, the Spider-Man pointing at Spider-Man meme debated by a judge in Florida, and NFTs (non-fungible tokens) recognised as legal property in the UK. Such is the way when a massive industry, if one can reduce “technology” to the singular, which we can’t, utterly changes the way we live (or the way we die, which, according to former Google engineer Ray Kurzweil, may not actually happen). Topping the list of favorite emoji in the global survey is the laugh-cry one, followed by a thumbs-up in second place and a heart in third place.There have been plenty of, shall we say, unusual or eye-raising legal decisions around technology.70% of emoji users think inclusive emoji, such as those that reflect different skin tones and gender identities, can help spark positive conversations about important issues.Overuse of emoji, however, can be annoying. ![]() Three out of four think it's fine to send an emoji instead of words when dashing off a quick response.88% of users say they're more likely to feel empathetic toward someone if they use an emoji.In fact, more than half of emoji users are more comfortable expressing their emotions through an emoji than via the telephone or an in-person conversation. Nine out of 10 emoji users agree that the icons make it easier to express themselves.The Adobe survey suggests a lot of people feel otherwise. "Weirdly, I want to understand people through what they say, not their ability to send me a badly drawn cartoon animal," she wrote. In 2019, the British columnist Suzanne Moore wrote a piece for The Guardian titled " Why I Hate Emojis," calling them vile and infantilizing and slamming their usefulness in adult communication. Emoji abstainers out there - you were not counted.Īnd, yes, there are such people. Perhaps these findings are not surprising, given who was surveyed: 7,000 emoji users in the U.S., Europe and Asia, according to Adobe, which is a member of the body that adds new emoji to the emoji standard. ![]() The Indicator from Planet Money EmojiconomicsĪmong Generation Z users, more than half said they'd be more satisfied at their job if their bosses used more emoji in workplace communications. ![]()
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