Unicode is over and it dies over Emoji
blog.koehntopp.info
blog.koehntopp.info
The idea that the default emoji represent white people is ridiculous, since the codepoints are meant to translate directly with Japanese computer systems. In the original NTT DoCoMo set, they didn't even have facial skin (probably because of device resolution and colour limitations), just features like eyes and mouths. Maybe the Unicode consortium made a mistake by specifying them as bright yellow, which people now associate strongly with the Simpsons, where white people are represented as bright saturated yellow.
In my understanding, nobody in the standardization process even considered that Emoji had a race. If people project one race or another onto what are supposed to be disembodied universal facial expressions, then that's their problem.
Those who aren't as familiar with the Simpsons would probably associate yellow with Asian --- which sort of makes sense due to them originally being Japanese.
Coloured emoji don't make much sense to me either --- they are text like any other, and should thus be represented with the same colour as the text.
Asians aren't yellow...
I don't think Unicode consortium initially specified any color for these characters. For instance U+1F604 is defined as "SMILING FACE WITH OPEN MOUTH AND SMILING EYES". I remember an early Android phone displaying these expressions on green robot faces. As far as I know color specifications only came later with the skin tone modifiers.
For some people, race, fighting for for recognition, let alone equality, is a daily battle. You may live and work far from this conflict, but it exists, and in some part the diversity modifiers for emoji provide folks with empowerment. Don't take that away over limitations in the spec.
There are billions now who own smart phones, and want that funny Japanese Telco encoding standard to reflect their world too.
This is not a technical or standards problem, and the fitzpatrick modifiers do not decrease functionality of unicode.
I feel my point is to chill, and consider how functionality outside your perceived value might bring others joy.
Have you ever considered how condescending it is to these people to say that white people need to be the ones to give these people the ability to "reflect their world" via technology by encoding things relevant to other groups of people in the specifications they write? Why don't these people "fighting for recognition" write their specifications, and their own software? Making white people do it for them cannot be empowerment - it's charity, and with that charity comes dependence, which is the exact opposite of "empowerment". The only real empowerment comes from the self, not by other people deigning to give you things for free so their peers will think more highly of them.
Quite literally nobody has bright yellow skin. Emoji are not human beings, they are エモ → e-mo → emotion 字 → ji → characters (update: apparently I've been misled, but not in a way which changes my point, see reply below). The codepoints do not contain, have never contained, and will never contain a racial identity. They are an abstract representation of universal human emotions, just as generic as single-line ASCII emoticons.
Nobody's racial identity was represented by Unicode emoji faces to begin with, and certainly nobody any less than me.
Thanks, I really do wonder why people lie to me or make things up. I guess that's what I get for never typing it into my IME in full.
> In my opinion while encoding pictures as text was a good idea at the time (due to limitations of mobile text messages), it makes no sense in 2017 where we have technology to easily inline any picture in the text even on mobile phones.
Even at the time, the character set was apparently meant to replace common phrases and text emoticons (for SMS, as you note). There's frankly no way anyone would have the time and energy to produce high quality custom images for simple messages, save for selfies.
Also, what about people whose skin is a shade in between those provided by the skin color emoji?
I mean, if you're not representing those people you're being racist, right?
You don't need to create a new character set to do that.
People fight daily against salmonella and we don't have salmonella emoji.
Also, if you're fighting for identity you're part of the problem -- you should be fighting for ambiguity.
You see, equal rights goes both ways.
If you demand special rights because you're different, that's not equal.
You want equal rights? You got it. Let's have a straight pride parade tomorrow.
Then we'll have a men's rights rally.
They didn't. It's recommended, but not required, to use a "non-realistic" colour, examples being yellow, blue, or gray.
Unicode’s aim isn’t to serve as a useful “palette” of characters that people should actually want to type ever. It’s to serve as a single, unified encoding for archiving existing texts. If people persistently write the same odd symbol on paper, then Unicode aims to ensure that they’ll have a common codepoint to encode that symbol to.
The worst case scenario for Unicode is a world where people encode texts onto forums with millions of little proprietary Emoji images, and then those sites close, the images are lost, the URLs of the images are just UUID.png or somesuch, and so the contextual meaning of the text is lost.
The second-worst-case is one where such texts blanket the internet, and—because of their various derivative-proprietary encodings—it becomes impossible to make such texts machine-readable/indexable/sentiment-analyzable/etc.
The Unicode Standards Body might be behaving rather silly from the perspective of someone who just wants to be able to record their own thoughts—but from the perspective of ensure the Internet and all its documents remain amenable to library science, the standards body is behaving perfectly sensibly. They’ll give people whatever they need to keep using Unicode in place of some proprietary extension, because that’s how you keep text on computers interchangeable.
That is, TIL that wordpress replaces these things on output, and there is not even a switch to prevent that. I had to install a plugin to fix this.
Isn't :-) sufficient and more efficient in terms of data transfer?
However, one question has occurred to me: what has the actual consequence of the skin-tone-modifier been on real-world emoji use?
The answer, in my experience, is that essentially no one uses skin-tone-modified emoji at all. This, in turn, makes me wonder if perhaps this was the intended result the whole time—to, in a very circuitous way, ensure that the "default" state of any given emoji has a generic skin tone.
The blog post gave some good examples.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/05/white-p...
http://www.businessinsider.com/kendall-jenner-used-darker-em...
I don't think white people use white emoji because being white isn't part of their self-identity. That's one of the normalizing qualities of being the dominant type (e.g. Hollywood). Just like nobody points out that they are heterosexual.
I live in Mexico and my darker skinner friends use the color tinted emojis.
And how do these consequences lead to Unicode being over/dead as the post title suggests?
This emoji business is sticky. On one hand, I agree that the current way is not sustainable - we can’t keep adding dozens of weird concepts like POO WITH CONCERNED FACE every year.
On the other hand, if you have a system whose goal is to represent humans, but certain humans feel that it can’t represent them (eg http://www.cnn.com/2017/07/18/europe/hijab-emoji-teenager/in...), then you have a problem.
Personally, I think it was a mistake to enclose the first smiley in a circle. It turned it from a facial expression, into a head with a face. It was all skeuomorphically downhill from there.
The funny thing is, the "prayer hands" emoji doesn't really exist in the spec -- its use is completely based on a misinterpretation of the Japanese "folded hands" gesture, which is supposed to mean "thank you".
I welcome a world where you don't need to be at all tech-savvy to get as much out of a computer as anyone else. People can drive without being engine-savvy, and I think it is fan-fucking-fastic that computing is moving in the same way.
Technology is such an amplifier for human activity, if everyone doesn't get to play, we're doing it wrong.
Any time anyone writes "this new thing that makes a system less elegant but opens it up to more people is a bad new thing" -- they are doing it wrong.
Last time I got flagged was a comment with a link to a picture of a Sikh with a sign that said he writes bug free code. As some Americans mistake Sikhs with Muslims that may have triggered something. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14209714
By the way: You can't post emojis here. Hacker News removes them from your comments.
Unicode has like a billion more spaces for characters.
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/blue-skinned-people-kentucky-re...
Isn't yellow sufficiently neutral?