Variation in Depiction of Same Emoji on Different Platforms Can Lead To Miscommunication

How your device depicts an emoji depends on the operating system it is running. The same "smiley face" emoticon, for instance, appears slightly different when viewed on an iPhone, an Android-powered handset, and a Windows Phone-powered handset. This variation can cause miscommunication between people (PDF), a study by GroupLens Research has found. The research lab in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota said that sometimes this can cause people to misinterpret the emotion and the meaning of emoji-based communication "quite significantly." The conclusion reads: Emoji are used alongside text in digital communication, but their visual nature leaves them open to interpretation. In addition, emoji render differently on different platforms, so people may interpret one platform's rendering differently than they interpret another platform's. Psycholinguistic theory suggests that interpretation must be consistent between two people in order to avoid communication challenges. In this research, we explored whether emoji are consistently interpreted as well as whether interpretation remains consistent across renderings by different platforms. For 5 different platform renderings of 22 emoji Unicode characters, we find disagreement in terms of both sentiment and semantics, and these disagreements only increase when considering renderings across platforms.

Comments

Need more emoji

[Anonymous Coward]

Is there an emoji for "Obvious research is obvious"?

Re:Need more emoji

[Anonymous Coward]

Clearly we need to create a federal department to protect us from misrendered emojis! For the children! To fight terrorists who would sow the seeds of dischord!

Re:Need more emoji

[infolation]

To fight terrorists who would sow the seeds of dischord!

"I thought my tewworwist fwendth emoji said that kittenz are wuvvley, fwuffy, nawwty and mentil. But my fwendth emoji ackchully said that kittenz are wuvvley, fwuffy, nawwty, gentil, mentil and lully."

Re:Need more emoji

[Hognoxious]

Is there one for "Pointless article about pointless research is pointless squared"?

Re: Need more emoji

[Anonymous Coward]

ðY

Re: Need more emoji

[jc42]

ÃY

Excellent example. I read it first on a FF window on a Macbook Pro, where it looked like an o with umlaut followed by a latin capital Y. But I copied it to the "Characters" viewer, which showed me that the first characters was in fact a "LATIN SMALL LETTER ETH". Even enlarging the FF window by several bumps didn't make it look like an eth. So it in fact displayed as a visibly different character in two apps on the same screen on the same computer.

Edit after viewing the Preview: That eth character is displayed by the Preview as a capital letter A with a tilde. But the new edit panel still displays it as an eth that looks more like an o-umlaut, even at a larger font size than I like to use. So it's even more messed up by even this app (Firefox) on this screen on this computer. I wonder what it looks like on other people's screens.

The emojis currently defined by Unicode are beyond hopeless as communication aids. Now if there were only some reliable way to use the ASCII emojis without them being mapped to the little icons on the receiving end. But I guess we've moved on past the stage where emojis are useful for actual communication purposes. The flakey implementations by the major eGadget vendors have reduced them to just artsy decorations with no reliable interpretation.

The rest of the world is slowly "extending" their alphabetic writing systems to a mess that's every bit as poor at actual communication as the mess that is Chinese writing. ;-)

Re:Need more emoji

[Anonymous Coward]

Pointless research about a pointless thing. I'll see your squared and raise you pointless cubed.

First world problems

[Anonymous Coward]

News for dolts. Stuff that doesn't matter a hill of beans.

Solution: don't use emoji

[Anonymous Coward]

If you can't express yourself with pure text, you are an idiot anyway.

Re:Solution: don't use emoji

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

If you can't express yourself with pure text, you are an idiot anyway.

Agreed. Emojis are the confetti of the internet.

Re:Solution: don't use emoji

[radarskiy]

"If you can't express yourself with pure text, you are an idiot anyway."

Or a speaker of Russian, Thai, Arabic, Cambodian, Chinese, Armenian or one of the many other languages that are not written with a Latin-based alphabet.

Re:Solution: don't use emoji

[Hognoxious]

They didn't invent the computer, or the things that led to it.

Sucks to be them. Do better next time.

Re:Solution: don't use emoji

[Anonymous Coward]

No, no, no. Head in the opposite direction... What we need is someone to write an entire novel in just emoji. One book, 100,000 or more possible interpreations of what it says. You read this idea here first folks, so 5% for life to me from anyone who actually writes such a novel. :)

Re:Solution: don't use emoji

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem historically is that these people have said ‘okay, we will do better next time’ and proceeded to make computers that showed their collection of glyphs instead. And that led to the wild growth of incompatible code pages and the huge mess that still haunts us today and that Unicode is trying to solve.

Re:Solution: don't use emoji

[Dog-Cow]

All those languages have a textual form. "Text" does not mean "Latin Alphabet".

Stop being an idiot in public.

Re:Solution: don't use emoji

[jc42]

If you can't express yourself with pure text, you are an idiot anyway."

Or a speaker of Russian, Thai, Arabic, Cambodian, Chinese, Armenian or one of the many other languages that are not written with a Latin-based alphabet.

Or English or Spanish or Esperanto, which are written with a Latin-based alphabet. ;-)

There has been more than a bit of linguistic study of the effectiveness of alphabetic and other writing systems, often dealing with the differences between what can be expressed verbally an in writing. None of our writing systems come very close to matching what can be expressed verbally (though the Unicode phonetic alphabet comes close for many languages).

In one linguistics course I took in college, the prof had a nice demo of the differences between written and spoken English (which he classified as different languages rather than dialects, due to the fact that native speakers have to spend years learning the written "dialect"). He gave us some short sentences, had spoke them with different intonations, and had us discuss the meanings of the utterances. The "winner" was the sentence "They're here." The class came up with 15 readings for which all the native speakers agreed on the meaning, plus a few more that speakers of the same English dialect agreed on but which differed in the different dialects known by classmates. He explained that spoken English is in fact a highly tonal language, with a minimum of 4 tone levels (pitches) and up to 3 tones for some vowels if you want to fully represent it in writing. Length markers are also needed for both vowels and some consonants, but that's a different topic. Linguists have ways of representing such things, but common written English doesn't. And a phonetic system is needed for the phonemes, so that for instance both readings of "read" (present, past) can be distinguished.

So no, you can't use any human language's Latin-based alphabetic representation to fully express the spoken language. OTOH, there are examples in most languages where things can be expressed clearly in writing that are very difficult to communicate by speaking. Many technical subjects have clear examples of this, especially subjects with a mathematical component. In particular, software developers often prefer to communicate via email, because it's so difficult to clearly express your ideas verbally in a way that won't be misunderstood. And there are running jokes going back to pre-computer times about the communication difficulties that groups of techies have when they don't have a blackboard (or whiteboard) to write on.

This is why calling them emoji is wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

Their proper name, emoticons, just sounded too clunky. Real emoji are rendered in text. You know, smileys and such.

Re: This is why calling them emoji is wrong

[Gonoff]

Emojis (? Emojii ?) and emoticons are two distinct things.

Emoticons are the simpler to use option and emojii cost more to use on some contracts. Some systems will try and substitute an emoji for an emoticon. YPYMATYC

Re: This is why calling them emoji is wrong

[wonkey_monkey]

YPYMATYC

What was that about my mother? Take that back!

Re:This is why calling them emoji is wrong

[Ark42]

Emoji is a Japanese-origin word (the E is pronounced like "A"). It literally means picture character. Here is the Kanji if you're interested - https://translate.google.com/?...

Emoticon is an English word (The E is pronounced like "E") combining Emotion and Icon. It describes how we use punctuation and other regular glyphs to make pictures such as :)

Toldja so, you morons!

[Zontar The Mindless]

This is exactly what I said would happen when I wrote to the Unicode Consortium asking them not to adopt emoji into the standard. Their response was that rendering differences in alphabetic/ideographic symbols with well-defined *objective* meanings never posed such a problem, so rendering differences for entirely *subjective* symbols wouldn't, either. /facepalm

Re:Toldja so, you morons!

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

There was arguably a case to be made for the one-time adoption of some 'emoji' in line with Unicode's "Sometimes we do horrible things so that even worse legacy standards and nonstandards can die." policy; but the failure to stop there has been a total clusterfuck.

Even good old Plane 0 is riddled with characters that should never have been allowed to exist; but if the Unicode Consortium had taken the principled stance and refused to hand out the codepoints needed to support migration from various legacy encodings, Unicode would probably still be more or less irrelevant in practice. Cleaning up the mess in the Japanese handset market is at least arguably in line with the same approach.

Once that was done, though, leaving open the invitation to turn Unicode in to a clip-art library was an atrocious plan; and bafflingly stupid(especially since the core mission of rendering actual languages is still pretty deeply unfinished once you wander too far from languages that can be handled with the latin alphabet and a few accents and umlauts.)

Re: Toldja so, you morons!

[110010001000]

I'll bet his letter was harshly worded too.

Re: Toldja so, you morons!

[religionofpeas]

I need an emoji to represent rending my shirt and falling to my knees, wracked with pain and guilt!

Spare us the lengthy description. Just give us the hex code.

Re:Toldja so, you morons!

[Anonymous Coward]

I was thinking that the real problem is that here we have an example of using multiple emoji implementations as characters within a single document to point out how the implementations can convey different meanings - time to make a new version of unicode that includes both "android emoji" and "iphone emoji" code pages. Need to keep that bidirectional transformation going

Re:Toldja so, you morons!

[complete loony]

They could have closed this loop hole by providing a royalty free font showing how the character should be rendered. Without that each platform is *forced* by copyright law to deviate from each other.

Re:Toldja so, you morons!

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

There are plenty of fonts available cross-platform(either because they are liberally licensed or because they are considered vital enough or cheap enough that more or less everyone throws them in; but fonts have never been Unicode's problem(their documentation does include examples drawn from one or more fonts, not sure who they use as a supplier and under what terms in order to provide examples; but those are explicitly noted to be non-normative and purely for the reader's convenience).

For the surprisingly messy business of font formats, we have other standards; and when transferring font/color/size and similar formatting information is important(as in any word processing application) the application's file format provides some mechanism for doing that.

We could theoretically blob all this together into one gigantic Ur-Standard; but creating hideously overlarge standards tends not to actually solve anything; it just moves you from a situation with a bunch of standards, only some of which are implemented on a any given platform; to a single standard which is only partially implemented(and always different parts) on any platform; which is basically the same disaster; but with uglier documentation.

It probably doesn't help that, even if there were a canonical-and-MIT-licensed emoji font, UI look and feel is one of the things that all the mobile platform vendors have enthusiastically sought to differentiate themselves on. It's not at all clear that Apple, Google, or Microsoft would be particularly happy if their pet UI's chosen font were interspersed with lowest-common-denominator-identical-across-vendors emoji; given how much attention each has paid to carving out a distinct look. If those vendors actually wanted a cross-platform emoji font; it would have been pretty trivial for them to make it happen: ~1,700 characters wouldn't be something you could get a foundry to do for free; but it would hardly be a crushing burden for the three of them to pay somebody enough to hack together the necessary font and offer it under a free, nonexclusive, license to anyone who wished to include it. That would pretty much be the end of the story.

As it is, though, various vendors have gone their separate ways; and don't even seem particularly interested in trying to emulate one another as closely as copyright law allows(here is a list of the emoji codepoints and their representations, if they exist, on various platforms. Not always even consistent within a given vendor's product lineup.)

Re:Toldja so, you morons!

[tlhIngan]

This is exactly what I said would happen when I wrote to the Unicode Consortium asking them not to adopt emoji into the standard. Their response was that rendering differences in alphabetic/ideographic symbols with well-defined *objective* meanings never posed such a problem, so rendering differences for entirely *subjective* symbols wouldn't, either. /facepalm

'
The only reason Unicode is adopting emojis is because Unicode is supposed to be that - a universal code. *every* character set in the world is supposed to be mappable to a Unicode codepoint in some way. Given Japan's innovation of emojis as characters, that means Unicode is forced to adopt them, otherwise it makes Unicode irrelevant as you can't just use Unicode and immediately inherit the ability to record every text in the world.

The only reason it's an issue is OS developers are letting users use them - they used to be a Japan only thing and you could view them, but not type them.

Easiest way is to let things like this happen and then have people lose their jobs over it or some other big misunderstanding to shy people away from using them.

Re:Toldja so, you morons!

[tepples]

The traditional solution to show different implementations of a single character is font markup.

Re:Toldja so, you morons!

[stub667]

I like having string encoding that explicitly tells me 'emoji of an old man walking his rhinoceros'. Its so much nicer to work with than having to write a custom parser for each source, like if I needed to parse github's :boat: syntax and worry about all the magic quoting rules. The world isn't going to go back so ASCII smilies. That :boat: has :bon-voyage:.

I'm not sure why people get so worked up about it? If you don't need them, you don't implement them. If you do need them, it makes things better.

Next up, how identical emoji in different cultures can lead to miscommunication. Or identical words for that matter.

"I thought it was frozen yogurt."

[Thruen]

"For the longest time, I thought it was frozen yogurt." - Weasel referring to the shit emoji.

Re:"I thought it was frozen yogurt."

[Anonymous Coward]

My wife thought this. And once she said it, I could see it. Honestly, a shit icon always seemed a poor choice to put into the set.

Re:Wait, what?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

And it does; within the scope of what Unicode is actually supposed to do,

The problem is every bloody idiot who doesn't understand the 'what Unicode is supposed to do' part. If characters entered on one platform are showing up as different characters on another; you've either got broken software or a unicode problem. If you want absolute certainty that the recipient will see exactly the glyph you associate with a character; you don't have a unicode problem; you want one of those "Image formats" that certain people on the cutting edge of technology are using to encode, store, transfer, and decode things for which visual fidelity is important...

The fact that 'emoji' are still being treated as Unicode's problem, long after the original issue with freaky Japanese legacy handset design has largely been cleaned up, is just so frustrating. If you want your stupid clip-art to reach the recipient intact, we have a variety of (mature and widely adopted) options for that. Full ICC support and absolute color fidelity? Probably not; but good enough? Sure. Stop trying to turn Unicode into the world's most dysfunctional image format!

Do the Japanese have any data?

[swb]

I thought the emojis were kind of a Japanese thing originally. Do they have any data on mixed perceptions of them? I'm assuming that as early adopters they didn't have a uniform version of the characters/icons and may also have suffered from lower resolution depictions of them.

Re:Do the Japanese have any data?

[AmiMoJo]

The early Japanese ones were proprietary, unique to each mobile operator. If you had an AU phone and your friend had a DoCoMo phone you couldn't trade emoji. In short order they got together and merged their sets.

Back then Unicode was totally inadequate for Japanese text as used by people day-to-day, and didn't have any emoji support anyway. Even now the bulk of Japanese text files and plain text email is Shift-JIS rather than Unicode. When Unicode is used in anything but trivial situations needs hacks to render properly. Westerners who run Japanese software need to use AppLocale because most apps aren't Unicode.

It's a total disaster and needs replacing with something better.

Re:Do the Japanese have any data?

[Anonymous Coward]

All of Shift-JIS was supported in Unicode 1.0 in 1991, and on modern systems Shift-JIS support has been implemented by software converting to and from Unicode internally. And modern here means anything post 2000 and quite a lot before that. (So yes, even when you view a text file that's stored on disk in Shift-JIS format, you are using Unicode, or at least the text editor and operating system are.) The first emoji on the other hand were introduced by DoCoMo as late as 1998 through proprietary ad hoc JIS extensions. (By the way, DoCoMo could just as easily have chosen Unicode as the character encoding to use for their service and shoved their emoji into the private use area, but Japanese people tend not to look beyond their borders, and the developers used Shift-JIS out of habit.) So while your post contains a grain of truth, it is coated in a thick layer of ignorance and mixed-up chronology.

fuck you and your emoji bull shit

[Anonymous Coward]

fuck you and your emoji bull shit

University of Minnesota

[110010001000]

So this passes as a valid research topic at the University of Minnesota? What a joke.

Re:University of Minnesota

[jrumney]

It has me wondering whether I can get grant funding for a study into my thesis that the use of emoji in and of itself is what is really causing the confusion, and whether or not my phone's fon has a depiction of steam coming off of U+1F4A9 doesn't mean shit.

Re:University of Minnesota

[Anonymous Coward]

What exactly is the problem?

Re:University of Minnesota

[110010001000]

Here is the problem: you have an entire field of things to study with your time and research dollars and you choose to study EMOJIS? What the F is an emoji anyway?

Re:University of Minnesota

[serviscope_minor]

Here is the problem: you have an entire field of things to study with your time and research dollars and you choose to study EMOJIS?

Yeah and? How humans communicate is interesting. And these days a good bit of communication is done using emojis, no matter how much old farts wish that wasn't the case.

What the F is an emoji anyway?

Failure to use google or understand common terms makes me :(

Re:University of Minnesota

[dontbemad]

What is the point of such shameless hostility? How is this not a valid research topic? They have shown marked differences in how subjects perceive what should essentially be the same display of emotion by which mobile platforms they use. This has hefty implications on modern sociology, including the ability to predict how subjects may react to the same exact message based solely on their choice of phone.

A joke? Why does something that doesn't interest you have to be labeled as "a joke"?

What you should really be asking is how your comment passes as a valid addition to the discussion. That is the true "joke".

Re:University of Minnesota

[dontbemad]

Angry old man who refuses to educate himself and demands to be spoonfed exactly what he wants to hear. In other words, the sad majority of the responsive portion of /.'s modern user base.

Re:University of Minnesota

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually it does. See?

Re:University of Minnesota

[SpaceDave]

I agree;The fact that emoji are rendered and interpreted inconsistently is actually useful knowledge. At the same time sentences like the following one really do beg for a good mocking:

  "Psycholinguistic theory suggests that interpretation must be consistent between two people in order to avoid communication challenges."

FFS, really?

Re:University of Minnesota

[turbidostato]

""Psycholinguistic theory suggests that interpretation must be consistent between two people in order to avoid communication challenges."

FFS, really?"

Yes, really: we only *suggest* it being the case because we need more grant money to be sure -once we finish a very nice experiment about mixing hot and cold water, that is.

Re:University of Minnesota

[Ark42]

According to http://ark42.com/unicode/emoji... it has steam on Android 4.4's font and the free font some Linux systems might tend to use by default. It also happens to have a face and eyes on Twitter and iOS/OS X. On Windows 7+ and Android 4.1-4.3 there is neither steam nor a face though.

Re:University of Minnesota

[Anonymous Coward]

Overheard:

A: Degree, huh? From where?
B: Minnesota. Class of 2013.
A: What did you major in?
B: Social studies.
A: Carrying on with the studies?
B: Oh, sure. Got my Masters and now I'm working on a PhD.
A: Wow, impressive. What's the subject.
B: Emoji.

Re:University of Minnesota

[Dog-Cow]

Have you ever been to Minnesota? They don't have hot water.

Well then maybe

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

Well then maybe, JUST MAYBE....people shouldn't use emojis for actual communication where meaning might be important.

I've heard that there are these things called "words", which, when used properly, have the amazing ability to convey information accurately.

I swear, soon we'll be back to grunting and painting pictures of animals by smearing our feces on cave walls.

Re:Well then maybe

[Nidi62]

I swear, soon we'll be back to grunting and painting pictures of animals by smearing our feces on cave walls.

I think we call that performing arts these days.

Re:Well then maybe

[serviscope_minor]

Well then maybe, JUST MAYBE....people shouldn't use emojis for actual communication where meaning might be important.

Except they do.

I've heard that there are these things called "words", which, when used properly, have the amazing ability to convey information accurately.

Oh gosh, I bet miscommunication over text channels which don't convey the subtelties of intonation and body language have never, ever happened. Also, in other news, Poe's law doesn't exist.

Re:Well then maybe

[Anonymous Coward]

Shut up, faggot

Re:Well then maybe

[Anonymous Coward]

Shut up, shit-for-brains.

You make asinine comments in response to almost anything that anyone says. Go back to jacking off in your mom's basement and let the rest of us have a discussion.

Re:Well then maybe

[Hognoxious]

Contracts and laws are put in writing, not crayon drawings or figurative dance.

Maybe there's a reason for that?

Re:Well then maybe

[TuringTest]

I've heard that there are these things called "words", which, when used properly, have the amazing ability to convey information accurately.

If you believe words convey accurate information over IM, you know shit about words and IM.

Re:Well then maybe

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

If you believe words convey accurate information over IM, you know shit about words and IM.

Perhaps you missed the part about "when used properly"?

I've had very little trouble communicating clearly and accurately over IM and other text-based channels, but there's always some imbecile who can't grasp the meaning of words, or who deliberately misconstrues them. Like you, perhaps.

Re:Well then maybe

[radarskiy]

"I've heard that there are these things called "words", which, when used properly, have the amazing ability to convey information accurately."

The key being "when used properly"... which is actually the same problem as described in this research.

Re:Well then maybe

[Alumoi]

Just wait a couple of years until the failbook generation comes to power.
Don't forget they're unable to spell so using drawings will be easier for them.

Re:Well then maybe

[serviscope_minor]

Contracts and laws are put in writing, not crayon drawings or figurative dance.

Well that defiitively proves that words are clear and unambigious, because no one ever went to court to dispute a contract. True story.

Re:Well then maybe

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

The key being "when used properly"... which is actually the same problem as described in this research.

I don't understand what you're saying, could you explain it again using emojis? :)

Re:Well then maybe

[radarskiy]

Yes, but my response would then be ambiguous. ;-)

Re:Well then maybe

[TuringTest]

>there's always some imbecile who can't grasp the meaning of words

Which proves my point. No matter how carefully you think you have selected your words, or how well you think you have used them, non-mathematical expressions are inherently ambiguous and therefore require the other party to interpret them. Communication requires participation of both ends of the channel, and you can't control what happens at the other end.

Re:Well then maybe

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

Which proves my point.

Errr, no. If anything, it proves mine.

-

No matter how carefully you think you have selected your words, or how well you think you have used them, non-mathematical expressions are inherently ambiguous and therefore require the other party to interpret them.

Like I said, you're proving my point for me. This is why people shouldn't use emojis for actual communication where meaning might be important. Or do you prefer deciphering hieroglyphics with multiple meanings rather than reading text?

But wait- why are you communicating with me in text, anyway? Shouldn't you be typing a bunch of stuff like "|| :) \_()_/ ;( *-^-*" or whatever?

Face it: text is the standard for unambiguous communication. That's why user manuals and contracts aren't written in emojis.

When you come up with something better than text (possibly enhanced with images), let me know.

Interpretation is a real issue

[fyngyrz]

Think about the shrug; what does it mean to you? Does it mean "I don't know" or is it a dismissive gesture meaning "I don't care" and/or "what you think is irrelevant"?

Think about the tongue sticking out: is it a playful, nose-crunched-into-wrinkles expression, or is it a "nyah, nyah, you suck" expression?

Think about the huge yellow smile. Think about context. Can you assure that the context you feel is in play, is the one the other person thinks is in play?

There's no universal guide to this.

Re:Interpretation is a real issue

[Anonymous Coward]

Or just imagine pure unadulterated faggotry. How does this relate to you?

Captcha: browned

Unicode

[fyngyrz]

The problem is every bloody idiot who doesn't understand the 'what Unicode is supposed to do' part.

Oh, you mean like the people who wrote, maintain(ed) and inherited the source code for slashdot.

Re:Unicode

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I haven't poked at it in detail; but does slashdot actually misunderstand unicode, or just not care very much? Taking a "your language isn't my problem; and my life is a lot easier in Latin-1" stance my not be terribly cosmopolitan; but it doesn't really represent conceptual confusion.

Re:This is why Slashdot doesn't need Unicode.

[fyngyrz]

It does no good when we post a good comment, get a great reply, then have to wait 30 minutes in order to reply to that reply!

Why, sure it does. It gives moderators the time they need to provide the "I disagree" mod your post so desperately needs!

Emojis do communicate important meta information

[Anonymous Coward]

"This is not to be taken serious. The person who sent you this is not an adult. Feel free to disregard." All of that compressed into a few bytes. Worth it.

Two Dots Too Many

[Edward Coffin]

This reminds me of an incident in Turkey back in 2008, described and analyzed in Language Log: Two Dots Too Many. Due to a cellphone being improperly localized, a normal letter i was substituted for the Turkish back unrounded i (which I cannot figure out how to display here, ironically enough), altering the meaning of a text message, leading to a tragic misunderstanding, which resulted in a group attack on the sender who then murdered the recipient and subsequently committed suicide.

Re:Two Dots Too Many

[religionofpeas]

altering the meaning of a text message, leading to a tragic misunderstanding, which resulted in a group attack on the sender who then murdered the recipient and subsequently committed suicide.

Seems to me that it's not the fault of the phone, but rather the hot tempered reaction of the people involved.

Re: Two Dots Too Many

[Anonymous Coward]

It's kebabs, what did you expect?

Re:Two Dots Too Many

[Gravis Zero]

That reminds me of an incident in the UK back in 2011. Where one guy called his friend a "mutter" (mother's boy) but autocorrect wrote "nutter" and so the guy stabbed his friend 104 times. I don't blame the technology, in fact, I think it was dead-on.

Re:Two Dots Too Many

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems he was a nutter after all.

Re:Two Dots Too Many

[david_thornley]

The problem's older than that. Otto von Bismarck provoked the 1870 Franco-Prussian War with a slanted translation (which tells you that the French were also spoiling for a fight, since it took that little to get the war on).

Re:This is why Slashdot doesn't need Unicode.

[Longjmp]

I have a brilliant idea: Can we have an emoji instead of "I disagree"?
Actually, /. should replace all mod options with emojis!
;)

just say no

[swell]

With hundreds of emoji on the loose it is hopeless to derive any specific meaning from them, even if your eyes are able to distinguish them. I recently found a list from a provider explaining the meaning of their interminable set of symbols. I enlarged them on my screen as much as possible and still couldn't see them clearly. After reading 20 or so definitions, I gave up.

Perhaps teenagers find them useful. Adults; not so much. Businesses not at all.

Think if it as Evolution In Action

[TheRealHocusLocus]

Darwinian moments in technology:
* emoji incompatibility starts land war in Asia, everyone gets involved
* HTML5 T-shirt design tool creates product with logo too small, off center
* LED light bulb that requires a cloud server and Android app to adjust
* people who type URLs into Google because, Internet
* video on YouTube degrades into noise, original lost among copycat uploaders
* everyone forgets that Al Gore tried to enforce escrow encryption, sell the Clipper Chip
* 140 character li

Re:Think if it as Evolution In Action

[dontbemad]

* 140 character li

You got me, there.

Re:Think if it as Evolution In Action

[Misagon]

* People who type URLs into Google because ... bug in Chrome.

Has happened to me too many times. And I use DuckDuckGo, BTW, which makes it even worse.

Where's the poll?

[Anonymous Coward]

All we need to know is how most people interpret a symbol, then we can adapt to that in input and output -- or willfully break expectations by creative reinterpreting. But to some people an aubergine will always be just an aubergine. Sometimes even a pipe is just a pipe.

Re:This is why Slashdot doesn't need Unicode.

[fyngyrz]

Let's take that one step further... let's replace the moderators with emojis. They'd certainly do less harm to the conversations.

really, now: who cares what the trogs think?

[eyenot]

Emojis are *already* visual cues, formed by the shapes of various ASCII or other character sets. They *already* suffer from this problem from the get-go.

The problem is that some people's brains are so fucking dull, so abused, so worthless, that they can't even interpret a smiley face made out of some characters.

• That

part actually has to be done

• for them

.

Who cares is some of the weirdos who've helped this brain-drain along by capitalizing on it screw up by not socializing with one another? Those people are trogs, too.

As soon as you say "hey, I'm going to make something that turns emoticons into little graphics," my first thought is, "wow, you're really out to fuck with people, aren't you?"

No good could have ever come of it in the first place. The people these replacement scripts cater to and the people who write and add to them are all together in the same barrel of shit-monkeys. They're the Morlocks to nations full of soft-headed Eloi.

Your only hope as the analogous Time Traveler is to get back on your Attention Machine and turn your attention elsewhere.

This article and all the attention you pay to it is basically the Morlocks showing their faces above ground and stealing your Time Machine away.

News Flash: Ambiguous communication confuses

[Anonymous Coward]

What a bloody shock.

Re:This is why Slashdot doesn't need Unicode.

[Anonymous Coward]

Can somebody please mod up the parent comment? It shouldn't be at -1. It's on-topic, it's relevant, and it's insightful. Lots of people have requested Unicode support here at /., but this article makes a good argument against it. They are really annoying on other sites that do support Unicode. I think YouTube's discussion is so bad because they allow emojis instead of forcing people to articulate their ideas using words.

Re:Wait, what?

[Hognoxious]

And it does; within the scope of what Unicode is actually supposed to do

Make text handling more complicated than it needs to be and waste storage & bandwidth?

Re:This is why Slashdot doesn't need Unicode.

[Hognoxious]

s/moderators/editors/

Old Man Syndrome

[Pinkoir]

If you want someone to understand your meaning unambiguously across multiple platforms why not try grouping the subset of emojis call "text" together into repeatable and recognizable patterns called "words"?

If I'm depending on the ability of someone else's software to properly render my high-fiving cats (or whatever) and the fact that one cat turns out to have different whiskers than I intended means that people go to the wrong restaurant I'm probably "communicating" incorrectly.

Re:Old Man Syndrome

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that at present different systems sometimes render what is supposedly the same character in a way that's semantically very different. So the trouble isn't of the number-of-whiskers-on-a-cat variety, but more like some systems choosing to render 0 as 8. Here's an example from the article:

For U+1F601 (“grinning face with smiling eyes” according to the Unicode Standard), participants described the Google rendering as “blissfully happy” while the exact same Unicode character, but rendered for Apple , was described as “ready to fight.”

I think that in the case of this particular character, the fault lies squarely with Unicode, as there are different ways to grin and different ways and reasons to smile, and that is semantically important and should have been part of the character name. (I've had similar problems in the past with the :-) emoticon getting misinterpreted because it's too generic.) Now, personally, I could have lived my entire life happily without knowing what an emoji is. But, given that people like to use emoji, for compactness, efficiency and adding tone for example, Unicode should ensure that the semantics of each character are well-defined and font / icon designers should ensure that these semantics are brought across to the user.

For example, the article also shows a number of emoji which are so badly drawn (e.g. Apple, MS), or so generic (e.g. Samsung, LG), that different people looking at the same icon on the same platform might get different ideas on what the icon is meant to convey. In my opinion, that is unacceptable for a character.

Cross platforms the problem is worse, because the icons shown don't just differ in rendering / drawing style, but are really different, more different even than the A of Arial and the A of Fraktur, and sometimes this makes them seem to mean semantically different things. There's a nice graphic where they show all the different icons that show up on different platforms for 22 emoji and the problem is striking. Again, I think this is unacceptable for characters.

I think that given that emoji are a thing we won't get rid off, Unicode must ensure that the semantics are satisfactorily specified and font and icon designers must do a better job, because frankly, I'm surprised that even big companies like Apple are happy to ship products using such ugly and ambiguous icons.

Re:Wait, what?

[Hognoxious]

Stop trying to turn Unicode into the world's most dysfunctional image format!

Just wait till the hipster SJWs behind it all find out that there are languages that have no written form.

They'll turn it into the world's most dysfunctional audio format too.

Meaning

[Anonymous Coward]

... whether emoji are consistently interpreted ...

What does the condom emoji mean:

I'm covered
I want one
I'm ready to fuck you?

Did anyone really use weiner + shell emojis as a pictorial definition of condom, before this emoji arrived?

Is there a emoji dictionary like this? In the emoji language, will condoms have feelings?

Even the emoji statement promoting the condom emoji is ambiguous. Being an American promotion, the circled fingers probably means 'OK' but in other countries, it will mean gay sex. Which is a happy coincidence because the homosexual community receives many PSAs regarding condoms.

According to this survey, all men avoid condoms, so condom emojis may be worse than useless. Also, why does this pictorial put love before sex? That's not the normal sequence of events.

Far from pointless

[Anonymous Coward]

This is really interesting as it helps us better understand how humans perceive si.e design features we take for granted. If something as simple as the design of an emoti can influence our interpretations of communications, imagine other subtle signals we send in our every day conversations, etc. Maybe if more people cared, we wouldn't have so many lonely trolls swarming our threads, and they would instead have gifriends or boyfriends to troll.

For Reference

[Ark42]

Are my emoji your emoji? - http://ark42.com/unicode/emoji...
A handy tool that compares many popular emoji fonts from various systems.

Re:For Reference

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for that reference. It's useful not just for comparison, but also as a kind of directory of what's available and consistently supported.

Shocking!

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm, ahh, No shit!

Emoji have meanings?

[Anonymous Coward]

I always figured that they were just the author trying to be "cute" or joke around (as in "here, have a sequence of meaningless gifs for no reason"). It never occurred to me that people actually take them seriously and try to derive any meaning from them.

But then it does explain the facebook posts I occasionally see from an acquaintance that consist primarily of hashtags and strings of emoji. Maybe one day when I'm bored I might take a shot at deciphering what she's trying to say.

really?

[Anonymous Coward]

wow. if you fucktard aolers cant communicate without the use of pictures, you have no business using any computing device.

Microsoft is working to improve theirs

[jdrch]

Good to see this major issue being addressed by research. FWIW Microsoft is improving its emoji support and image design to be less confusing. Details here http://mspoweruser.com/windows...

Re:This is why Slashdot doesn't need Unicode.

[fyngyrz]

s/editors/moderators and editors/

Good luck asking people how to interpret a symbol

[tepples]

All we need to know is how most people interpret a symbol

That's easier said than done. Sometimes just asking someone what a symbol or word means, if the symbol or word is offensive, is enough to trigger punishment for having used the offensive symbol or word. Concrete example: hearing discussion on the playground, not knowing what a "blow job" is, and asking your teacher.

An emerging ideographic world language?

[dpbsmith]

I've seriously wondered if the gradual adoption of more and more standardized icons and emoji is slowly creating an ideographic, common world written language.

I know that a few "fast forwards" and smileys here and there is a long way from verb tenses, and I don't think I've seen people use a string of several symbols to create a meaning that's different from the sum of its parts. But we're only a couple of decades into the process.

Re:This is why Slashdot doesn't need Unicode.

[Anonymous Coward]

... and now thanks to Deadpool we can sleep better knowing exactly what the Turd emoji is; never ever raising any confusion again about someone responding with a 'chocolate ice cream' (WTF?). This should definetly be a mod-option.

Re:This is why Slashdot doesn't need Unicode.

[jc42]

Actually, /. should replace all mod options with emojis!

Facebook is way ahead of us with that. (And the ambiguities of their emoji mod levels fit right in with this topic.)