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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.
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.
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!
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.
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...
If you can't express yourself with pure text, you are an idiot anyway.
Agreed. Emojis are the confetti of the internet.
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.
Why, sure it does. It gives moderators the time they need to provide the "I disagree" mod your post so desperately needs!
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
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.
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."
I have a brilliant idea: Can we have an emoji instead of "I disagree"? /. should replace all mod options with emojis!
Actually,
;)
There are fewer illiterates than people who can't read.
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
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
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...
YPYMATYC
What was that about my mother? Take that back!
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
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>
Let's take that one step further... let's replace the moderators with emojis. They'd certainly do less harm to the conversations.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
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
Is there one for "Pointless article about pointless research is pointless squared"?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Make text handling more complicated than it needs to be and waste storage & bandwidth?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
s/moderators/editors/
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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.
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.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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 :)
Morphing Software
Are my emoji your emoji? - http://ark42.com/unicode/emoji...
A handy tool that compares many popular emoji fonts from various systems.
Morphing Software
"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.
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...
They didn't invent the computer, or the things that led to it.
Sucks to be them. Do better next time.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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. :)
All those languages have a textual form. "Text" does not mean "Latin Alphabet".
Stop being an idiot in public.
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. ;-)
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
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.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
s/editors/moderators and editors/
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
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!
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.)
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.