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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

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:The Unicode Consortium

[93 Escort Wagon]

Have you ever heard of any committee anywhere voluntarily disbanding?

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: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.

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?