Do We Need More Emojis?

mikejuk writes to note that the Unicode Consortium has accepted 38 new emoji characters as candidates for Unicode 9.0, including characters depicting bacon and a duck."Why could we possibly need a duck? Many of the new characters are the 'other half' of gender-matched pairs, so the Dancer emoji (which is usually rendered as Apple's salsa dancing woman) gets a Man Dancing emoji, who frankly looks like a cross between John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever and your dad at the wedding disco. ... Other additions include carrot, cucumber, and avocado, and bacon. ... The list of additions is rounded off with new animal emojis. Some are the 'missing' zodiac symbols (lion and crab). Others are as baffling as ever – is there *really* a demand for a mallard duck? Sorry: it's in fact a drake!

Comments

couldn't hurt

[steak]

the long slow death of literacy could not possibly be harmed by more emjois.

Re:couldn't hurt

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

I chuckle when people frequenting the site that invented "RTFA" complain about other people using shorter sentences.

Re:couldn't hurt

[ganjadude]

we moved on from hieroglyphs, we dont need to be going back to them

Re:couldn't hurt

[Trepidity]

The real reason Slashdotters don't like emoji is that this site, in 2015, still can't properly display Unicode anyway.

Re:couldn't hurt

[fustakrakich]

Yeah, but now there's bacon...

Re:couldn't hurt

[TWX]

Only character that I would like to use on Slashdot that doesn't work is the Degree symbol, Alt-248. Even then I can work around that without major problems.

Re:couldn't hurt

[Zontar The Mindless]

I'd like to be able to use Chinese in my sig.

And no, we do not need fucking emoji in the standard. Especially not when there are still actual *writing* systems that haven't been properly handled yet.

Re:couldn't hurt

[Number42]

The difference between hieroglyphics and Chinese characters (Korean just uses a syllabary as far as I know) is that while hieroglyphics were actually alphabetic in nature, hanzi/kanji are ideograms. So hieroglyphics are actually closer to the alphabets in use today.

Re:couldn't hurt

[KGIII]

We're moving back to dumb terminals anyhow. What's another aspect of life making the slow march towards regression?

Re:couldn't hurt

[mwvdlee]

Don't edit them away. Let them stay in all their misrendered ugliness.
Slashdot should be fixing their bugs, not us working around them.

Re:couldn't hurt

[hcs_$reboot]

this site, in 2015, still can't properly display Unicode

I don't think that's really the problem. A web site with UTF-8 encoding does not have much to do to get unicode to be displayed correctly. The site merely just has to let the characters go, any recent browser then displays the codes appropriately. The reason slashdot does not show unicode (first byte above 0x7F) is because the characters are filtered out, either when being recorded within /. database, or during the transmission up to the browsers.

Re:couldn't hurt

[ultranova]

we moved on from hieroglyphs, we dont need to be going back to them

We moved on from hieroglyphs since writing by hand was so tedious anyone bothering could be assumed to be serious in unclear cases. Since writing and sending messages has moved on to an everyday form of personal communication, it also requires a concise way to express tone and emotion a non-professional writer can manage. And in practice that means some form of smileys, so we can as well optimize them.

Technology exists to serve people's needs, after all.

Re:couldn't hurt

[AmiMoJo]

The Chinese, and to a lesser extent other Oriental and east Asian cultures, are what are driving the adoption of these new emoji. As you probably know, Chinese characters are ideograms, little pictures representing things and concepts. It's hard to describe just how influential this has been on Chinese culture... I guess it's kind of like a emoji of a carrot is sort of pun, almost.

So yeah, while I agree that there are huge problems with Chinese in Unicode and other issues that need addressing, these emojis are already in use in China (special software support on phones and in IM apps like QQ) so they should be supported. The goal is to support all forms of written communication, and these characters are in common use.

The ones added for completeness, e.g. male counterparts to female emoji, are obviously important for other reasons.

Re:couldn't hurt

[jellomizer]

When they moved off hieroglyphs, I expect the reasoning was more political than an actual analysis of the benefits of changing.
You know that getting taken over by Rome stuff. Having the population and demographics shifts where people from other cultures gets integrated in the culture where some of their ideals and values get moved in.
Now there was probably some level of communication loss by leaving the hieroglyphs, that its alternatives never really did pick up. Now as time goes on perhaps we should allow some changes, and get out of Victorian values in literacy.

Re:couldn't hurt

[jellomizer]

That is just a standard fluctuation in the computing market. It moves back in forth from centralized to de-centralized systems. Normally based technologies available, and how we use the data available to us.

Re:couldn't hurt

[drinkypoo]

The Chinese, and to a lesser extent other Oriental and east Asian cultures, are what are driving the adoption of these new emoji.

No, just stupid ones. It takes a real idiot to think "this picture-writing system that we've got has been a stone around our neck limiting our ability to express complex thoughts for two thousand years... what we really need is another picture-writing system".

Re:couldn't hurt

[drinkypoo]

Since writing and sending messages has moved on to an everyday form of personal communication, it also requires a concise way to express tone and emotion a non-professional writer can manage.

You mean an idiot? Instead of expecting people to exercise their language skills, we're just enabling stupid people to be more stupid. Their last motivation to learn to speak properly was to communicate with other idiots like themselves, and emoji shits on that.

Meanwhile, they're actually a really shitty way to communicate, because they are far more difficult to tell apart on a small screen than are words. Emoji are stupid, and people who use them are stupid by extension. But we knew that, because if they weren't, they would have just written what they meant instead of using an ambiguous sad face fucking a duck.

Re:couldn't hurt

[Pieroxy]

If emojis are supposed to convey emotion, hopefully in a standardized fashion, what's the emoji for sarcasm, universally agreed to and understood?

emojis are supposed to convey emotions, which is not to say emotions are all represented by an amoji. Do you eat bananas? Are you a chimp?

Re:couldn't hurt

[ultranova]

You mean an idiot?

No. Why would you think I did? Apart as a rhetorical prelude to your following tirade, of course, but surely an expert communicator like you you could launch into one without having to twist other people's words into a springboard?

Instead of expecting people to exercise their language skills, we're just enabling stupid people to be more stupid.

And believing that you of course used a telnet client to read this discussion and post your message, since a "browser" makes the process easier, thus letting even you manage it? Or does it only apply to skills you already (mistakenly think you) are good at, thus completely coincidentally maximizing the chance that you have an unfair advantage in any interaction?

Grammar and spelling exist to faciliate efficient communication. Trying to use them as a barrier to silence people you dislike for whatever reason means you not only missed the mark, but somehow managed to get a bullseye on your own asshole. Though judging by your attitude, that's easier for you than most.

Their last motivation to learn to speak properly was to communicate with other idiots like themselves, and emoji shits on that.

Smileys are only relevant to written text, not spoken word. Furthermore, unless it's one specific emoji you're concerned about, it's "emojis shit", not "emoji shits".

Meanwhile, they're actually a really shitty way to communicate, because they are far more difficult to tell apart on a small screen than are words.

This is the first and only relevant or even remotely intelligent point you've made in your own sad attempt to communicate. And if you insist on using a mobile device which lacks a zoom function yet supports less-used unicode characters, and use this device for the type of communication where it's critical to be able to tell a smiley from a frowney, it might actually make sense to ask people to take this into account when messaging you. But frankly, that sounds like a very specific corner case that has little if any relevant to designing technical standards for common use.

Emoji are stupid, and people who use them are stupid by extension. But we knew that, because if they weren't, they would have just written what they meant instead of using an ambiguous sad face fucking a duck.

And yet your message would had been improved by replacing most of its content with oral bestiality. At least then you could had blamed it on a computer virus rather than whatever is infecting your central nervous system, and even if you'd failed you'd come across as a mere pervert rather than an arrogant shithead who wants to make life more difficult to other people for the mere reason that you think it should be. It would also have provided more value to this discussion, or any discussion.

Re:couldn't hurt

[freeze128]

"I'm feeling very BACON today."

Re:couldn't hurt

[AthanasiusKircher]

We moved on from hieroglyphs since writing by hand was so tedious anyone bothering could be assumed to be serious in unclear cases. Since writing and sending messages has moved on to an everyday form of personal communication, it also requires a concise way to express tone and emotion a non-professional writer can manage.

Excuse me if the following sounds a bit exasperated, but you do realize that people actually communicated informal messages to each other written form BEFORE texting, right?

People wrote letters and postcards, and they've been doing this for centuries. People wrote office memos and short notes to loved ones, either left in a box for someone to pick up or perhaps carried by courier to the recipient. Once the telegraph was developed, people sent telegrams and paid by the length of the message, so they often managed to communicate extraordinary emotions in a few lines of text. (I have the telegrams sent between my grandmother and grandfather when my mother was born during WWII and my grandfather was overseas. You can easily get the emotions they were experiencing from the short texts; it's quite moving, actually.)

I don't think you realize the extent that people used memos and couriers in the days before telephones, or the extent that people wrote informal postcards to each other or short letters on a regular basis to keep relatives and friends abreast of ongoing events. Mail used to even be delivered multiple times per day in many places in the U.S.

While handwritten notes sometimes could include graphical symbols, most people didn't make a lot of use of them, because text is so efficient at conveying ideas.

And we already have symbols to express written emotion and tone -- they're called punctuation. Even a "non-professional writer can manage" to use them. The main ones are ! and ?, but you can also convey quite a variety of emotions through combinations: !! vs. !? vs. ?! vs. ??, or even things like (?) or (!), etc.

A little personal anecdote: a few years back, I happened upon some letters sent between my grandparents during WWII. Actually, both of my grandfathers served overseas during WWII, and I have letters from both of them. A few things to note:

(1) They didn't seem to need emojis to express a considerable range of thoughts, ideas, and emotions. (It's very moving to read some of their letters.)
(2) They possessed a better grasp of written grammar, usage, and style than most college undergraduates I've taught. They still made errors, but I assume the fluidity of their writing is due to lots of practice in casual written communication (as was incredibly common back then).
(3) They weren't professional writers. In fact, one had attended school to 6th grade and the other had attended only until 4th. (This was also fairly common in the U.S. before WWII.) Yet they somehow got enough out of "grammar school" back then to be able to communicate in writing on a level comparable to at least a high-school graduate today.

I've seen enough examples of letters written by other relatively lower-class soldiers in wars (in documentaries, etc.) to know that my grandfathers weren't outliers either.

And in practice that means some form of smileys, so we can as well optimize them.

"Smileys" are/were somewhat different. Most "smileys" were used in place of actual facial expressions: a grin, frown, wide-eyed look of surprise, wink, etc. There's no direct verbal equivalent to these facial expressions, but they could of course be simply represented as *wink* or [grin] or whatever too, utilizing only a couple more characters.

The set of easily recognizable facial expressions is relatively small. Even if we include common and nearly universal body language gestures like nodding, shaking the head, and "thumbs up," we might only need a dozen or so such representations to convey expression/gesture.

But as you say, emojis are no lo

Re:couldn't hurt

[ultranova]

First, I am quite capable of retrieving the page content via telnet.

But did you? Y'know, to practice your skills?

Second, the page content was actually deliberately formatted to be interpreted with a web browser. A whole layer of material was added to the content specifically to make that convenient.

So your convenience matters, but other people should "exercise their language skills". How utterly unsurprising.

In what way am I using grammar or spelling to silence people? I am trying to encourage grammar and spelling, so that people can have a voice. You are trying to encourage people to engage in the digital equivalent of baby talk, so that they can never express a complex thought. You've got it completely backwards, fucko. You want to disempower. I want to empower.

Really? Because this is what you actually wrote: "Instead of expecting people to exercise their language skills, we're just enabling stupid people to be more stupid. Their last motivation to learn to speak properly was to communicate with other idiots like themselves, and emoji shits on that."

So tell me: if smileys enable "stupid people" (to use your elitist terminology) to express the thoughts they wish, which is the logical requirement for them to replace some other form of communication, such as written text, in what way would disabling them "empower" said people? All it does is make communication less convenient and thus less frequent. Of course, if that's your actual goal, your means make perfect sense.

If you insist on being a disingenuous douchebag, you can only talk meaningless shit.

I assure you, my dislike of your ideas and attitude is quite sincere. Also, perhaps you shouldn't call people "idiots" and expect a polite response. Douchebags exist to deal with shit, after all.

There's plenty of places where you're not allowed to zoom, yet where emoji can appear.

Such as? And in any case, if they can render modern fonts, which are vector graphics, making said smileys part of the font should actually solve this problem. Or at least let you read the HTML source, which you above imply you're capable of doing.

Seriously, everything you said was wrong. Why do you even bother?

Because malevolent bullcrap like yours is slowing down progress everywhere I look. If you want to communicate solely through six-page hand-bound letters written in calligraphed Oxford English, that is certainly your right. And if someone else chooses to use pornographic smileys to imply that getting a blowjob from a duck turned out to be a bad idea, that's theirs. But no - you insist on having a say on how they may or may not communicate, for their own good of course.

Betteridge's law of headlines

[Foochee]

According to Betteridge's law of headlines: No.

Re:Betteridge's law of headlines

[Calydor]

You just did. Just sayin'.

Betteridge's law of headlines says ... no

[UnknownSoldier]

We got enough glyphs -- we don't need a fucking symbol for every idea / concept / etc.

Re:Betteridge's law of headlines says ... no

[Anonymous Coward]

Tell that to the Chinese that after 8000 years still don't see a use for a phonetic alphabet. If the Japanese were able to modernize their language in 46 Hiragana glyph I don't see why we should tolerate that Chinese non-sense in unicode. These assholes keep adding new kanji every year just because some prick want to write his name in a unique way.

Re:Betteridge's law of headlines says ... no

[Daniel_Staal]

Several of these really need to be generalized. We're getting male/female/black/white/asian/etc. variants of everything, needlessly complicating the system. Unicode has inflection support - just mark that 'male' or 'female' is an inflection, like an accent mark. Combined characters, for one glyph.

And yes, that means the 'standard' is gender and race neutral. People might make assumptions; deal with it. It's better than doing 'this is a smiley, and this is a female smiley'.

Re:Betteridge's law of headlines says ... no

[fredgiblet]

We should add in lesbian, gay, transgender and genderqueer versions of all the emojis! Even bacon!

Re:Betteridge's law of headlines says ... no

[I'm New Around Here]

And yes, that means the 'standard' is gender and race neutral. People might make assumptions; deal with it. It's better than doing 'this is a smiley, and this is a female smiley'.

This is exactly what we would expect a man to say.

Re:Betteridge's law of headlines says ... no

[Zontar The Mindless]

The Chinese wouldn't add more kanji. They might add more hanzi, though.

You are aware that the Japanese still use several thousand kanji in addition to hiragana and katakana, right?

Oh, and the Chinese do have at least two systems for phonetic representation--zhuyin and pinyin.

Re:Betteridge's law of headlines says ... no

[arglebargle_xiv]

We got enough glyphs -- we don't need a fucking symbol for every idea / concept / etc.

I would agree with you, but not before they introduct an emoji for "Ah fsck, I know I went out to pick up some more nappies and baby formula but they had a discount on beer right next to the entrance and after I got that I forgot about the baby stuff because they had beer nuts as well, those little crunchy ones where you can eat a ton of them without them making you feel sick, and then I ran into Joe, you remember Joe, we were at school together, and what with one thing and another I completely forgot the nappies so I'm heading back again now to pick them up, which is why I'll be late". Then you'd need a few variants to deal with things like running into your friend Alex instead of Joe, the beer nuts actually being pretzels, and so on. As soon as they add the emojis for those critical communications, we'll be done.

Re:Betteridge's law of headlines says ... no

[Octorian]

Yet Emoji actually came from Japan.

Re:Betteridge's law of headlines says ... no

[Carewolf]

Yet Emoji actually came from Japan.

The name did. The Emoji signs actually developed in parallel, and we still mainly use the emoji native to the West. For instance, Japan: ^_^ West: :-) The icons are just graphical representations already establish systems of emotional tags in chat.

Re:Betteridge's law of headlines says ... no

[SuricouRaven]

But only 46 Hiragana characters. You can write anything in Japanese using only hiragana if you wish, with the exception of loanwords, though native speakers may look down on you as semi-literate if you do so.

Who proposed tem?

[phantomfive]

Who proposed the emojis? Someone must want them.

Re:Who proposed tem?

[DNS-and-BIND]

There are people out there who want new for new's sake. They are desperately bored with their lives and demand novelty. Long-term thinking is alien as well as boring. They're going to demand the mallard duck and the avocado, cheer when they are approved, and then never use them. Next round of Unicode, they'll have more dumb ideas to include.

Coming up: Unicode 16, when the committee gets fed up with all these dumb symbols that nobody uses and purges the list.

Re:Who proposed tem?

[mwvdlee]

I call this the "Greenpeace syndrome". After having achieved ones goal, the organisations' continued existence becomes the new, unspoken goal.
For Greenpeace this meant taking on new targets which had nothing to do with (or were almost opposed to) the original goals (which is why Patrick Moore left).
For the Unicode Consortium, having come close to including every existing character, this means inventing new ones to include and grasping for straws.

Re:Who proposed tem?

[mwvdlee]

Greenpeace wasn't founded to stop pollution or preserving old nature. It was founded to stop nuclear testing.
Those other goals might well be good goals for an environmental group and this is not a criticism of going after these goals.
I'm just using Greenpeace as an example of an organisation that could have been the breeding ground for new groups, but instead chose to justify it's own continued existence by drastically altering it's own purpose.
Likewise, standardization of smileys might be a good goal, but probably not one for the Unicode Consortium to handle. UC could be breeding ground for a group that could try to standardize smileys, but UC itself should only adopt them afterwards and stick to symbols already agreed upon in the outside world.

Re:Who proposed tem?

[TheRealHocusLocus]

There are people out there who want new for new's sake. They are desperately bored with their lives and demand novelty. Long-term thinking is alien as well as boring. They're going to demand the mallard duck and the avocado, cheer when they are approved, and then never use them. Next round of Unicode, they'll have more dumb ideas to include.

Coming up: Unicode 16, when the committee gets fed up with all these dumb symbols that nobody uses and purges the list.

Everyone wants to lift their leg and etch their mark on the Monolith. For example, I have my very own IANA-allocated SNMP Community Enterprise Number. It has four digits in the mid-5000s allocated some 20 years ago and since they're up to ~46,000 now that makes me an Internet alpha male. When I'm drinking at bars late at night I rehearse pickup lines in my head, you know, let's get out of here and I'll show you my private IANA SNMP CEN. Over the years it's really paid off and I'm now well rehearsed, able to deliver a pickup line should the occasion ever arise.

Some day I'll finally settle down with some other SNMP Community Enterprise Number. The circle of life goes ever on and on, down from where it began. C'mon Baby, let's go load Unicode Support. Would you like to see my avocado?

But for real excitement we could dispense with all these centralized standards committees and map ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING into DNS-and-BIND namespace. Then we can map DNS namespace through a virtual device driver into an NTFS filesystem. Then use de-frag in Windows XP de-frag the whole damned Web and condense it into a single spherical shiny clump. Then jump back and see where it rolls.

oh, why bother?

[retchdog]

"Other additions include carrot, cucumber, and avocado"

can't we be honest and just put a long skinny dick, a thick dick, and a stubby thick dick, so that people don't have to use vegetable analogues?

otoh, this way we can text shopping lists and sexual encounters/anxieties with the same symbols, so i guess it makes some sense.

The Unicode Consortium

[msobkow]

To me it seems like the Unicode Consortium is just trying to "justify" their continued existence, as the main job they set out to do was finished several years ago.

Re:The Unicode Consortium

[93 Escort Wagon]

Have you ever heard of any committee anywhere voluntarily disbanding?

I don't believe this

[93 Escort Wagon]

Some of you guys are complaining about bacon? What is wrong with you people?

Fixed Headline

[ZeroSerenity]

Do we need Emojis?

No

[ronnie39]

Definitly not , emojis are for s7up1d ppl

Emoji to express rage over excessively Emojis

[floon]

Emoji 1: pure rage about Emojis

Emoji 2: moderate rage about Emojis

Emoji 3: oncoming rage about Emojis

Emoji 4: pure bafflement preceding rage about Emojis

The consortium needs to finish human languages

[pauljlucas]

This guy still can't write his own name correctly.

Concern over emoji

[tompaulco]

After reading about this concern over emoji, I decided to go look it up to see what it is. Apparently, it is little cartoon icons, possibly animated, that people slip into their online conversations. Other than auto-changing of some popular emoticons to emoji, I have never used them. Don't care, next story.

Re:Instead of trying to create a unique set of sym

[Octorian]

In other words, the "eXtensible Emoji Protocol" (or XEP) that I keep joking about around the office :-)

The problem with emoji is that there are so many, but not enough to cover every possible symbol someone might want to send. As such, people see the gaps a bit too easily, and are constantly demanding "just one my symbol." (Not to mention that most people don't realize they're part of a universal standard, and not something each individual IM service decided to include/exclude.)

Eventually, you'll either wind up with an unmanageable bazillion emoji (rather than just hundreds), or there will be a backlash where we reduce to a minimum set necessary to represent all possible concepts. (Hey, isn't that called an alphabet?)

Re: Fuck the Chinese

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't flame me for posting anonymously. My job at strategic defence command forbids identifiable posts.

do we need emojis at all?

[Tom]

Ok, I'll admit I'm not 16 anymore, but I'm not 60 either and I wonder WTF does the Unicode Consortium have to do with stupid smileys?????

This is one of the "don't they have more important things to worry about" moments. But more importantly, this is utter crap and doesn't belong into a fucking fontset. You want to have dancing teddy bears and cups of coffee and stuff, fine, make your own icon font, nobody stops you.

Until this post I didn't even realize that this crap is now official Unicode, and I still can't believe it. Solution looking for a problem, yes?

Re:do we need emojis at all?

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's a video on the subject.

It's worth spending the time to watch it (heck, it's worth spending time to watch most of Tom Scott's videos - it's Sunday, you don't have anything better to do anyway), but the jist of it is that the goal of the Unicode system was to have a single representation which would be able to encode *all* existing electronic documents. Emoji were already existing as a special feature of documents (text messages) send over certain Japanese phone systems (this is why we call them emoji, rather than "smileys"). If you wanted to represent those messages in Unicode, you need to have code points for emoji. To omit them from Unicode means there are existing electronic documents which *cannot* be converted into Unicode, meaning you're still stuck with standard proliferation, the very thing which Unicode was intended to fix.

Now that rationale only goes as far as the existing emojis. It doesn't extend to the new emoji. The reason for those ... well ... that's because emoji escaped their Japanese origin, and the worldwide community is wondering why there are six different emoji for sushi and none for <insert other regional cuisine here>

Re:voluntarily disbanding

[ion_]

Have you ever heard of any committee anywhere voluntarily disbanding?

FWIW,

The (informal) standardisation of Haskell 98 was an important turning point for another reason: it was the moment that the Haskell Committee disbanded. There was (and continues to be) a tremendous amount of innovation and activity in the Haskell community, including numerous proposals for language features. But rather than having a committee to choose and bless particular ones, it seemed to us that the best thing to do was to get out of the way, let a thousand flowers bloom, and see which ones survived.

The Unofficial Smilie Face Glossary

[TheDarkener]

This was pretty much the definitive list of what later became known as Emojis - The Unofficial Smilie Face Glossary. Even this was excessive and most weren't used besides :-) or >:-). Later on, most people dropped the nose, resulting in :) . As technology became more mainstream, for some reason some dumbasses thought it would be cool to have graphical smilies replace what people had created as an artistic expression using standard ascii, and in some cases upper-ascii and even ANSi on BBSes. BBSers used to customize smilies to try and stay away from the current "mainstream"... Perhaps they thought conveying emotions with smilies had become too standardized and didn't reflect them as an individual. Favorites of mine were :>, =), and most recently =} , all of which somehow get eaten up by my phone and turned into graphical pieces of garbage. I just want my smilies. That's it. Now get off my damn lawn.