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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.
Is there an emoji for "Obvious research is obvious"?
But UNICODE emoji were supposed to solve all confusion!
This is a perfect example of why Slashdot doesn't need Unicode support. All it would do would let these stupid fucking emoji be used here, and they'd render differently for different readers, assuming they even render properly in the first place. It would only lead to disruption and annoyance.
We've been expressing ourselves fine here for many years using the basic ASCII characters. There's clearly no need for other characters, especially when the audience here knows and uses English.
If there's anything that should be fixed first, it's the posting limits. They're way too low. In order to carry on discussion here we need to be able to, you know, write comments and have then be accepted in a timely manner! 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!
News for dolts. Stuff that doesn't matter a hill of beans.
If you can't express yourself with pure text, you are an idiot anyway.
Their proper name, emoticons, just sounded too clunky. Real emoji are rendered in text. You know, smileys and such.
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
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
"For the longest time, I thought it was frozen yogurt." - Weasel referring to the shit emoji.
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.
fuck you and your emoji bull shit
So this passes as a valid research topic at the University of Minnesota? What a joke.
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.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
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.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Oh, you mean like the people who wrote, maintain(ed) and inherited the source code for slashdot.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
"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.
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.
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.
...omphaloskepsis often...
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
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
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.
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.
part actually has to be done
.
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.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
What a bloody shock.
YOU SHOULD BRING
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.
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.
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.
Are my emoji your emoji? - http://ark42.com/unicode/emoji...
A handy tool that compares many popular emoji fonts from various systems.
Morphing Software
Umm, ahh, No shit!
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.
wow. if you fucktard aolers cant communicate without the use of pictures, you have no business using any computing device.
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...
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.
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.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!