The Absolute Denial of Shit
openspace.sfmoma.org
openspace.sfmoma.org
- They changed the gun emoji to be a water gun, which has a totally different meaning. This retroactively changes previous writings, changing their meaning. What kind of writing system allows people to change your words after you've written them? Emoji is a trash writing system and an agent of kipplization.
- Emoji is controlled by corporations that are concerned with maximizing the value of their platforms which will lead them to a PG13, disneyfied, milquetoast worldview.
The good news:
- In the entire human history, it has never been easier to create and publish text, audio, or video works of any kind. The most popular platforms have severe limitations, but it only takes the slightest effort to use other platforms that are uncensored.
- There is plenty of free software that can give you pixel-level control over your output, you don't need to rely on the unicode consortium or any other organization of any kind to determine what you express.
Any kind of writing system allows this. Translation changes the words, and can change meaning. People can mis-quote. And yes, over time, meanings of words change, as do the cultural contexts from which they came. None of this is unique to emojis.
The truth is that all communication has at least two parties, and there is never a guarantee that the receiver will get the message as intended. Even if you do craft "pixel-perfect" emojis, people still can (and likely will) mis-understand the nuances of your intended message.
Think of the word "gun". The image that entered your mind just now was not a water gun. It was a weapon, the kind of device the gun emoji used to depict and now no longer does.
The people forcing this kind of change want you to associate the concept of a gun with a water gun or other toy, and they think that by changing your though pattern this way, they'll make society safer.
This is terrifying and totalitarian idea. Once you buy into the idea that you can force a change to the language to achieve your desired social aims, there's no intrusion into private life that you will be unable to justify.
Very Orwellian. In 1984, that was the point of Newspeak - to make it impossible to express certain ideas.
I.e., if you choose to mean a handgun when writing a watergun, the emoji’s meaning can change.
Anyone born in the last dozen or so years.
When "pistol" changed to mean "toy gun", it (1) happened in two years and (2) was decided by an oligarchy of actors (and not even the Unicode Consortium oligarchy).
Can you spot the difference?
Granted, I’m assuming historians will use the emoji set at time of writing, but that’s not trivially available.
In the case of emoji, we're aceepting the idea that when I said gun, I in fact did not say gun, I said water gun. You can interpret the water gun as gun or water gun, but really I never said gun
this comment could be interpreted as a threat 50 years down the line, by the change of meaning over time, but any sane person understanding that history and context matter, with knowledge of how it would be interpreted today, would realize its not. But if we applied the same acceptance to text as we do with emoji, the whole thing could be changed such that in both this time, and 50 years from now, it would be interpreted as a threat. The same context argument could apply, but I'm also sure defenders of the change would also not see the need to maintain a log of how things have been changed, as I doubt they care about emoji changes today.
The words themselves aren't simply appearing differently; they're changing, right from under my feet. The only defense is that (afaik) the unicode assortium has not changed yet changed the naming for it (ie CRYING FACE EMOJI), but since no one in practice refers to that definition, its not a useful defense.
Thus, emoji in their current form are highly inappropriate as a medium of communication, except in the very limited use case of short-lived, impermanent, and same-implementation communications.
But since this constraint is not the intention of the unicode consortium, and this is not the intention of the groups/font-creators that support emoji, and this is not a limitation that the general user expects, then this is a very poor design.
Emojis have been accepted as intentionally corruptible communications, but no party involved actually realizes the implications of it. We don't change ascii (ignoring the latter 127 characters, which are open to any interpretation) except by accident and by intentional non-meaningful changes (changing fonts does not change the characters themselves, just their aesthetics [except I guess wingbats]), and everyone would throw a fit if they did, because the notion is absurd
UPDATE posts SET text="I hate brown people" WHERE post_id=17560983
Fonts and rendering and apps will change just like compilers and source and runtimes. aka bit rot.
---
Want to preserve your output? Then print to PDF with embedded fonts. Or use screenshots.
Want to be able to recreate your output? Then treat your content like devs treat their software.
I used to write prepress and print manufacturing software. I also did a tour of duty as our tech writer. Our team's entire publishing workflow got a lot more sane when I treated it like any other dev task.
Make dependencies explicit, use source control, pin down versions of apps, drivers, fonts, OSes, etc (aka colophon).
Our "build servers" even had VMware images, containing our desktop publishing apps, used to automate PostScript, PDF, and web output.
(This is long before Chef & Ansible, CI/CD, etc. Kids today have no idea how good they got it.)
The meaning of the words will change over time, but not the words themselves. So someone who reads it will know what the words written actually were, and just have to lookup any differences in meeting between when the words were written and now.
Imagine for a second if we took Shakespeare and rewrote it with modern day English, and then made the claim the new version is the original Shakespeare... I think we would see the problem with that. But that is what happened with emoji. It isn't that people look back, see as collections of pixels, and realize now those pixels mean water gun while in the past they meant firearm. When they look back, they see water gun.
1. orthography also changes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s)
2. the purpose of words is to communicate concepts, if the meaning of the word changes the word itself has changed, reducing a word to its mere orthography is nonsensical
Not of things already written down. The long S written in the Constitution is still there. It has not changed, and there would be outrage for anyone to go and change it. Changing the emoji from one meaning to another would be like changing the encoding of utf-8 so that a now means e and e means a, meaning that and and end flips in every utf-8 encoded file that is viewed.
File this away under "myths programmers believe about language," with some bullet points like,
- A word or symbol will always have one meaning.
- Okay, but at least those meanings will stay the same over the next decade.
- The next year?!
Words change meaning because your present-eyes are different from past-eyes.
The gun symbol has changed meaning because your present client is different from past clients.
In my opinion if the people that changed the gun emoji had done it by introducing a new watergun emoji, replaced the gun with watergun on the keyboards, and declined to make their devices capable of emitting the sequence of bytes representing the gun, I would have been fine with that, and for their preening purposes I think that would have been sufficient. I'd consider that annoying and rude, but not malicious. If you have a unicode text file with the gun emoji, and you don't know when it was written, you genuinely can't tell what the author wrote as a symbol, even ignoring all the complexities of language, almost as if the word was blurred, and you can't tell between two possibilities.
I read this as "Emoji is a recycling bin writing system"
So just as a ballet dance, or a particular performance of it, isn't the right medium for world leaders to express international political sentiment, similarly, emoji should not be expected to convey any precise sentiment in critical situations. The author says as much:
>If emoji are to become adequate vehicles for discussing public health, the legal system, and art, their depictions need to be molded by users rather than a handful of software companies.
I don't think anybody is seriously considering the use of emoji in the way in its current mode of usage for communication when precision is needed. In the first place, there is no standard pronunciation of emoji characters, which in itself is sufficent to make their use in formal documents an iffy suggestion. Arguably, if we ever standardize a reading/interpretation of emoji, the concern raised by the author becomes rendered moot and the choice of graphic representation becomes a stylistic one.
When we consider the current imprecise nature of emoji, message corruption due to companies somewhat altering the precise meaning of the emoji become much less significant.
East of Eden's third act is a whole debate about how to interpret "timshel" from the original bible into English, and how those interpretations have warped our thinking.
The kind that gave us this: https://i.imgur.com/pfkBj1D.jpg Edit: Turns out this one's a photoshop
It's still pretty common. Dyck Insurance was just running radio ads a couple years ago with the slogan "Everybody loves Dyck".
Er, this happens all the time, writing or not. So many words in the languages I speak fluently have changed meaning over hundreds of years -- especially in French!
This is not a bad thing, provided the rate of redefinition is low enough and that we record the changes so we can understand older writings.
I wouldn’t worry too much. People will combat this with creative workarounds, such as using the eggplant emoji to represent a penis.
Ever heard of this book called The Bible? People have been changing the meaning of stuff in there for thousands of years.
This is an overblown/not new concern - emojis have always rendered according to the client platform, so you never knew if, for example, your :-D was going to be a big smile or a laugh to the recipient.
From the op:
In his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera linked this kind of forced conformity to a fascist government’s unbounded desire for control, and its efforts to limit expression to kitsch, a cartoonish denial of objective reality
This is also a historical feature of communist governments. All governments, and all societies, in as much as they lose a commitment to individual rights, will tend to grab more and more control in pursuit of difficult goals. It's yet another thing that seems "nice" but which has disturbing implications under the surface for free speech, like Canadian Bill C-16.
Zen fascists will control you
100% natural
You will jog for the master race
And always wear the happy face
Of course, that doesn't make for a good ingredient in angry epithets.
Corporations certainly have purges. Happens all the time after mergers.
Both are authoritarian political philosophies with a heavy handed approach to economic policies.
Differences come in privatization, immigration, equality of rights, and religious toleration. [1]
Both have extreme takes on ideas falling under the umbrella of socialist thought (hence, Germany's National Socialist Workers party). You can argue 1984 vs Brave New World, but there are certainly common themes.
Both differ significantly from classical liberalism.
[1] http://www.differencebetween.net/miscellaneous/politics/ideo...
No more trash than any other.
Plus... I'm amused at your use of "trash" in that way, given your horror of signifiers changing significance.
> There is plenty of free software that can give you pixel-level control over your output, you don't need to rely on the unicode consortium or any other organization of any kind to determine what you express.
... the whole point of having a writing system is having a standard writing system, at least de facto, and without the Unicode Consortium, there would be some other standards body because that's how computer software works. That other standards body would be worse than the Unicode Consortium by virtue of not being the Unicode Consortium, and therefore being either irrelevant or an agent which destroys cross-platform compatibility.
> No more trash than any other.
This isn't accurate. Writing systems excluding emoji are used to communicate linguistically. Emoji are not a linguistic phenomenon; they have semantics, but they have no syntax or pronunciation. That's why there's so much anxiety about the image a recipient sees matching the image you sent -- nobody cares if they send a message in one font and the recipient views it in a different font, because there is agreement on what an A is, what an f is, etc.
Compare the traditional Chinese character for "come", 來. This is a picture of a stalk of wheat, but people wanted to talk about coming, and they borrowed a word that sounded the same so they could write it down. "Wheat" was originally written this way too, but the concept of coming was so common that "wheat" was driven to a different character, 麥. This all works because the characters are being used to write a language rather than to free-associate based on some pictures which have no specified relationship to each other or anything else. Emoji do not fit in Unicode because they are not part of a writing system. They're a hack for sending image data without having to send the full image over the wire.
All languages are completely dependent on a set of words that have no semantic value at all, like the English word "of". Emoji do not support these, and if they did, they wouldn't be emoji.
I agree regarding the Unicode Consortium, the reason I have that under "good news" is that the publication tools we have now are immensely better than what there was in the past, and we can overcome the limitations of reliance on anyone using existing tools. Even though there is a cost, the cost is lower than ever.
I submit that the only difference is... time.
Perhaps a better questions would be: Do you believe that we should close the set of human language scripts? If so, when?
That's a serious question.
You might say that we should not invent new scripts (there goes Klingon), only accept new Unicode codepoint assignments for existing scripts. OK, but, really, you want no evolution of scripts? I don't think the Chinese -for example- would appreciate that, as Han/Kanji have been added over time, and even recently[0][1]. So perhaps you might say "just don't invent new scripts". Ok, but, why not? Why should we close one enormous aspect of human culture to innovation?! And what if some language authority (e.g., the Spanish Royal Academy) were to decide to incorporate emoji? International politics has had a definite and substantial effect on Unicode's design and evolution -- do you think that the Unicode Consortium can somehow start to resist political pressure where it has not been able to?!
You can see where I'm going with this. Emoji are new ideographs. Love them or hate them, that's what they are. Me? I like phonetic systems, but I understand that ideographs add expression dimensions that most of us outside countries where ideographs prevail... just are not even aware of. There are word games to be played in, e.g., Japanese, which will just not translate well to English -- though to be fair the reverse is also true, just in a completely different way.
I don't think opposition to emoji is politically tenable, not in the long term, and probably not in the short term either.
[0] https://www.quora.com/Are-new-Chinese-characters-still-being...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_j%C5%8Dy%C5%8D_kanji
Anyone from standards committees know that when you attempt to standardize something early that is in development and still mutating, you either 1) prevent further change of the development if your standard is widespread enough, leaving you with an early, not-well-thought-out version that the world has to live with or 2) your standard must keep up with the changing reality, making your standard change over time, which is synonymous with "a bad standard" or "not even a standard".
Unicode has a perfect solution already for glyphs that are currently in development: unspecified reserved blocks. If a tribe of humans wants to develop a language around smiley faces, they can use one of these blocks until Unicode Inc. recognizes that it is consistent enough to standardize. But instead, Unicode has placed emoji in the mainline standard.
There's only one explanation for Unicode's horrible decision. Ideagraphs are controversial, and controversy creates votes and attention, which funds their company. If you think this is the way it should work, emojis are for you.
So what? In a digital world, not having a Unicode codepoint assignment means not having the character at all, not even with pen and paper. Therefore rejecting emoji is the same as rejecting new scripts altogether. I don't think that's wise.
EDIT: Also, regarding private use codepoints, since the desire is to interoperate, those cannot be used for emoji.
But accepting emoji to the official standard on the spot? I see they've chosen my (1) from above.
Apple and Google, and their users, want to interop. PUC is a non-starter.
However, going back to my original point, UC's decision to standardize smileys from Japanese icons was a mistake, and it can be reversed by releasing that part of the standard into a non-UC-endorsed extension, or by deprecating it entirely, recommending system-dependent methods for transmitting icons instead.
I prefer SDOs like the IETF, which are not pay-to-play, but, really, a seat at the UC is a drop in the bucket for nation states.
The only substantial difference I can think of to support not having Unicode codepoint assignments for emoji is this: there is no calligraphy for emoji -- the vast majority of non-artist emoji users cannot write more than a handful of emoji with pen and paper.
But soon we might find that most people cannot write with pen an paper in any script anyways. Cursive has already gone into the dustbin of history, whether we like it or not.
"Kanji are the adopted logographic Chinese characters that are used in the Japanese writing system"
These were already not-ideographs even when they originally made their way to Japan.
EDIT: It seems to me that you're arguing that Han are not ideographs, but here's a definition of the word from wikipedia:
> An ideogram or ideograph (from Greek ἰδέα idéa "idea" and γράφω gráphō "to write") is a graphic symbol that represents an idea or concept, independent of any particular language, and specific words or phrases. Some ideograms are comprehensible only by familiarity with prior convention; others convey their meaning through pictorial resemblance to a physical object, and thus may also be referred to as pictograms.
Now, Han are independent of language, being used to write multiple rather different languages (Mandarin, Cantonese, Taiwanese, Japanese), and they do represent ideas or concepts. They do also get used for only the sounds of the spoken words (in each language) for the same ideas/concepts, in which case they may mean very different words altogether. And they get used in combinations that aren't ideographic themselves, but none of that makes Han not-ideographic in origin and character.
A 'free smiley pack' actually kinda describes where it came from. It was the standardization of symbols used by Japanese text networks. It's basically like if the ubiquitous vBulletin smilies had been standardized.
I don't think it can be deprecated, but it should probably follow the same rules as other Unicode symbols. It's bizarre how easily emojis are added to the standard in comparison to other symbols. Especially when there are serious problems with differing implementations of the standard.
Adding symbols from existing scripts requires research. It requires experts in that script to document the new symbols. It is exceedingly difficult to fix character definition errors.
Adding emoji is fairly simple by comparison. All you need is someone to submit a drawing, character name, and character metadata, and then maybe consensus. Because a new emoji a brand new character, no research is needed to avoid definition errors.
I also think it's also much harder to define an emoji than you're giving it credit for. There's been a lot of unintentional variation in meaning between implementations, and I think part of that is due to a lack of guidance by the standard (particularly in smilies).
[1]: http://unicode.org/L2/L2011/11232r-sup-punct-proposal.pdf
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuation#%22Love_point%22_a...
When you have a concrete depiction of something, you are forced to provide details. The problem is that users cannot tell what details are standard and which are only in their font. Hence more guidance is needed for creators of emoji to ensure important, necessary details are consistent.
Scott McCloud discusses iconography and the differences between how words and pictures convey ideas in "Understanding Comics". I don't think he has a perfect model, but his Big Triangle is a pretty good starting point for a discussion. http://scottmccloud.com/4-inventions/triangle/index.html
The further you go left in that triangle, the more guidance is required to ensure that all implementations are depicting the same thing.
A few typical examples would be 日 (sun), 人 (person) and 目(eye). No matter the font, the glyph for 人 will not imply details like gender. For emoji, extra care needs to be taken to strip out irrelevent details or you end up with problems like the 'pedestrian' emoji[1].
One ginormous problem of inventing and adding emoji is there is no credible end to the process. The numeric range of code points will be filled up and then what?
Hopefully we're a few decades away from that eventuality...
I do hope the UC is reserving enough codepoints for existing human languages, and new Han/Kanji.
The Unicode discussion for the "no" symbol (COMBINING ENCLOSING CIRCLE BACKSLASH) suggest the use of "No" on the gun glyph for "no guns":
No guns ⃠
That's a combining mark; you can apply it to anything.
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-gun-emoji-change-squirt... [2] https://metro.co.uk/2015/08/07/activists-want-the-gun-emoji-... [3] https://www.wired.com/2016/08/apples-new-squirt-gun-emoji-hi...
Incompleteness is manifestly NOT a problem for an ideographic script.
Besides, at least as far as Discord/Slack goes, most people I've found just upload their own little emoticons as they are more meaningful and great for inside jokes on a particular server/team.
In the meantime it's possible to insert emoji into text as smiley, -smiley-, :) , smiley.jpg, ::smiley:: or whatever you want and the system you use is free to change it into a picture.
We end up with standard that is full of ancient symbols from 2000-2025 and new generations of people will abandon them for something else when the culture changes.
Emoji from 80s:
________
/ "Ship Arriving Too Late to
/ Save a Drowning Witch"
/ /\ F. Zappa> Text 572-51 with the words “send me” followed by a keyword, a color, or even an emoji and you’ll receive a related artwork image and caption via text message
Stuff like this makes me happy for technology
I wonder how many of the people apparently incandescent with rage at the "authoritarian nature" of vendors changing a gun to a water pistol to bring into line with other vendors had similar objections back when Microsoft changed their original scifi toy gun to a pistol back in 2016...
- Emoji decoupled from Unicode, and represented as SVG by chat clients. This ensures our expression is not limited by the Unicode committee.
- Any user can upload a new emoji as SVG.
- Any user can download an emoji that appears in one of their messages, and place it in their own library.
- Emojis can also be downloaded from web-pages etc.
The other thing that Emoji have going for them is that they're text and can appear where text does, and for that to work I am pretty sure you need a Unicode Consortium.
It's been proposed!
http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2016/16105r-unicode-image-hash.pd...
Now think about us sitting here in 2018. Computer rendered text has been around for a while (ASCII, UTF, .doc, .html, etc.) In another 200 years, the way we transfer, encode, and view those formats will be completely perfected and probably unrecognizable to us. They will probably be ubiquitous in a way that seems completely alien to us now, and all of the implementation issues we worry about in 2018 will completely fade away (proprietary vs. open, security vulnerabilities, compatibility, accessibility, etc.).
With this in mind, being reluctant to add enrichment to how document transfer works seems like it's obviously on the wrong side of history.
https://web.archive.org/web/20090328112312/http://www.wipp.e...
(original on energy.gov is gone)
That brand of thinking ruled the world for a long time, but it got its ass kicked basically completely around the end of the 18th century. I have no idea why the rich people at the top of tech companies seem to like it so much. But it's becoming increasingly clear that these systems of communication are enabling a greater level of control and there are some sick-minded powerful folks who will need to be reigned in as they are more than willing to take those reigns. No one should have those. Global culture can, and eventually will, guide itself.
Humanity is a wonderful species, but only in its totality. In the cut-down whitewashed conformal mass that Facebook and Google and others want to construct and sell to people, then try to force on the rest, it looks more like a metastatic infection. The tech companies are unquestionably at war with basic human nature. They do not like humans very much, and they want to change them. Like their forebearers in the Industrial Revolution, they seek to round off the rough edges, smooth out the wrinkles, and will wreak any amount of suffering necessary to do so. Engineers need to think very hard about the ethics of their work. "Just doing my job" holds exactly as much moral weight as "I just did it for money", so keep that in mind. It's an empty dodge.
" a distinct work-life balance has been replaced by free food, ping pong, and services that do your laundry or drive you to work. This puerility is internalized so profoundly that it extends to corporate hierarchies and the way essential tasks are discussed. Software engineers are often colloquially referred to as “rock stars” or “ninjas” in job postings, and childish jargon is pervasive. "
Which is ridiculous considering the article is about poop and gun cartoon depictions.
If we just assume that isn't going to change maybe we could adopt an app that has its own emoji representations separate from the operating system.
And/or maybe we need to start some political process working on the companies to improve their representations.
I think this is the tip of the iceberg and is more important than most people realize. Censorship is no joke.
What I'm really saying is, I'm angry about the kind of person who tends to abuse them. Getting angry over little pictographs on the internet is silly after all, right? :-)
Emoji do become problematic when you start asking follow up questions, such as “what does feeling ‘bad’ feel like?” Since you’ve already expressed your specific state when you replied with your first emoji, to add more depth you start having to combine reaction emoji to express something new or repurpose other emoji as symbols. Which sounds a lot like any language actually
A far more dangerous problem is that emoji can replace the idea of the things they are intended to represent. For example: the happiness emoji becomes our idea of what happiness is, instead of merely representing the concept of happiness. That seems to be what the article is driving at and it clearly would be bad if this widely happened. The result would be newspeak type language, incapable of expressing many ideas and that is controlled by these huge companies. Worse, using such a language, your subjective experience of life has to fit into the emoji standard because you lack the tools to express or even conceptualize anything beyond it.
Well but how is that different from how words have worked since the dawn of civilization? If tomorrow the collective society starts using the word kaleidoscope as an euphemism for penis, then any software that statically maps words to meanings will also fail. This is not a problem tied to emojis specifically.
http://fortune.com/2018/03/20/gun-laws-gun-crimes-state-gun-...
“Potentially”, because it may (who knows) accidentally have come to the correct conclusion, notwithstanding its shaky basis, but it could just as easily be wrong.
The author of that article even goes as far as writing “Correlation does not equal causation“ and in the same sentence goes on to call it a trend, which I find contradictory.
At the very least it’s worth further study. And yet here we are discussing the corporate control of emojis on freedom of speech. And while that’s worthy of discussion- we are all still free to use English (or <insert your language here>) instead of a language that is unfree.
To the best of my knowledge no one has yet died as a result of misinterpretation of the gun emoji.
This highlights a YouTube policy that I found very disturbing. YouTube judged that graphic violence, defined somehow, was unacceptable and couldn't be shown on their platform. In particular, they didn't allow the posting of beheading videos featuring South American gangs beheading people who they thought deserved it. The reasoning was that allowing people to watch those videos served the gangs' purposes by inspiring fear.
But, YouTube made a special exception to their policy to allow beheading videos of ISIS beheading people who they thought deserved it. The reasoning was that allowing people to watch those videos carried the message "look how bad things are in Syria", a message that Google endorsed.
I can't for the life of me understand why the reason any particular person uploaded a video to YouTube should determine what I get out of the video. In my eyes, if YouTube was full of videos of gangs beheading informers, cops, and guys who slept with the boss's daughter, uploaded by the gangs themselves, that would be newsworthy and probably draw a lot of attention to the message "look how bad things are in South America". It's not like ISIS was ashamed of the beheading videos they filmed and released for propaganda purposes.
Unfortunately, I can't provide a link to substantiate my characterization of Google's policies; my source is an English-language interview between a former YouTube executive and a Chinese consultancy, which I was asked to help transcribe.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/mar/01/marine-le-pen-...
An example of this already exists: in a Facebook comment, you can reply with an arbitrary meme, and I believe Slack lets you define emojis as well. We could extend this to include sound, or even modes for haptic or braille feedback. If there isn't space to attach the mode you could simply provide a URL.
This could be turned into a standard, and apps could implement the standard, allowing people to communicate with richer content across a wide array of technology.
The whole benefit of Unicode is that anyone anywhere can see Unicode on any device that supports it, without introducing added complexity of sending the actual image over the message.
It seems a lot more sensible to actually send the picture you want to send, or a link to that picture, because that doesn't need to be interpreted differently by each client... just rendered. Sending the actual image might take more space in, say, a text message, but its actual encoded size should be pretty trivial. For example, one of Twitter's 16x16 color emoji is a 400 byte SVG file. Base64-encoded that would be about 533 bytes. The standard could define the image formats accepted, with probably one ideal format for emoji (SVG) and another for memes (JPEG).
Here's another way to think of how you could implement this in a standard. Each message is multipart. The text body is the first message by default. That text can contain references to other parts. That reference could be the name of the part you want to reference in that message, and that name would only need to be unique to that message. But that name could also be, for example, a SHA hash. When you accept messages, you could store the message parts in a database with their SHA hash. When someone sends the same part again in a new message, you can just retrieve that part from your database, rather than storing the same part multiple times. This could allow you to send messages referencing the same gigantic meme file 50 times, but you only ever store it the one time, and after that you just store references to it. The standard would allow you to simply say "please reference part X in this part of the message text, and if you don't have that part yet, here it is, base64-encoded or linked via URL".
(What I just described is MIME, but you could reinvent it if you wanted people to adopt it, because people don't like adopting things that aren't new and cool)
Nonsensical garbage. The Arrows, Technical, Box Drawing, Block Elements, Geometric Shapes and Miscellaneous Symbols blocks were all part of Unicode 1.0.
> It seems a lot more sensible to actually send the picture you want to send, or a link to that picture, because that doesn't need to be interpreted differently by each client... just rendered.
1. Except now you need to design a way to design and render mixed content.
2. If that's your argument, why even have letters and fonts? Just send the right images.
Apps already have ways to render mixed content. How do you think you can see both text and pictures next to each other? E-mail has supported this for decades. The linked article even explicitly mentions how different apps render different image sets for the same emojis.
We have different fonts for several reasons, and sometimes we do send entire fonts in order to render our messages correctly. What font you use, and how you choose to render graphemes, is completely up to the application. What I'm proposing is a more interoperable way of sharing mixed content, which people clearly already want to do.
Some text.
[an image]
Some more text.
HTML, MMS, whatever.
Some things are too essential to discard for this reason.
What will change is what emojis are used and how. The rare ones which are not used by parents will become used by kids. I already see this.
Great quote
"He brought a squirt gun to the birthday party."
Clear enough?
Such as? I thought "kitsch" perfectly summed up the essence of a restricted, infantilized worldview.
An early example of this is http://xn--n3h.net/ or snowman in hat dot net (turns out hacker news strips unicode emoji.) Some browsers convert to punycode to reduce the incidence of phishing attacks based on homoglyphs (two characters that look the same).
“What the tech industry can’t obfuscate behind algorithms is often relegated to some form of infantilization, in which a distinct work-life balance has been replaced by free food, ping pong, and services that do your laundry or drive you to work. This puerility is internalized so profoundly that it extends to corporate hierarchies and the way essential tasks are discussed. Software engineers are often colloquially referred to as “rock stars” or “ninjas” in job postings, and childish jargon is pervasive.”
Emojis are silly little pictograms. If you want something more varied, send an image or a gif or a meme. Or settle down and type out a few of these things we call words, that have the capability to be very expressive and unambiguous.
If you were to accept that emoji are an important part of modern communication, would you not agree that censoring certain images is akin to censoring words? Then, the reference to "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" is very apt.
I didn't get the impression that the article was suggesting that the people who vote in the Consortium have any sort of nefarious intensions -- and I don't think that there is much to be gained by a fascist government by censoring the word "shit". The decision to do stems from personal taste, prudence, or social pressure. It is not the intention behind it that we should be afraid of, but the power of some organizations to form our means of communication, independent on how "good" they are, as there are many unpredictable factors that can shape their decisions.
A set of images designed by advertising and consumer goods companies are not optimized for expressing the full range of the human experience? I'm shocked! /s
The real critique: we've had <img> since the 1990s, and plenty of more than usable chat systems/protocols/markup languages that allow inline images for about that long as well. Why are standardized emojis so popular, and why do people even give a fuck about them when there are obvious workable alternatives?
Emojis are not "radical" or "new", as the author puts it. They are a crippled instantiation of an old and obvious idea, an idea that has itself been implemented in better ways thousands of times prior to the rise of emojis.
I do believe you have to specifically except humans from "animals", unless it was your intention to include us, in which case I do believe you are mistaken.
So yes they very much deserve the title.