Why the Emoji Was Inevitable (2017) | Hacker News Reader

Why the Emoji Was Inevitable (2017)

nautil.us

16 pointsdnetesn49 comments

Emoji are inevitable because text - the basic communication medium on the Internet - is a very poor medium for conveying emotions. That's why first emoticons, and then emoji - the modern pictograms - happened.

Writers have relied on their words only to convey emotions for a very long time. It's only recently that we've been drawing faces next to our words instead picking good ones.

Because writers invest time into using the right words especially since they're going to be published somewhere. You can surely see the difference between this and texting, which is supposed to be quick.

Most people on the Internet aren't writers, and don't want to spend long minutes of reading text to get an emotional reaction that they can get in an eyeblink by looking at an emoticon. Literary expression of emotion isn't something easily comparable to emoji.

Eh, I could just write [wink], or [SAD FACE].

Emoji are just the evolution of that idea. They're more pleasing to look at, as well.

Yeah, but now we have to think about it. "Hey, do we have a test for when someone types in an emoji into their credit card number?". Punks.

That's a funny example considering an input validation routine for credit cards should automatically throw out any input consisting of more than numerals and spaces. You don't need to test for Unicode or emoji when there are only 11 possibly valid characters in the input.

On a tangent, I find it interesting how many people who came up during such a period of profound change as the computing revolution, still have problems with other changes.

Yes, but the code that actually checks for the valid characters can bomb if Unicode blows its brains out.

That's exactly how emoticon placeholders worked in the days of internet forums. Things like :grin:, at least in my mind, get associated with images though; the emoticons have likely already corrupted my brain enough for that to happen.

;) and :( are universal. Yours requires English.

[guiñando] [CARA_TRISTE]

Now, what the fuck did I say? Can you figure it out? What if I chose different words?

Well the mobile keyboard does not allow you to express yourself in great detail.

So you just litter your desk with about a dozen emoji-ized keyboards like Tom Scott did (as a stunt)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3AtBE9BOvvk

I'd say text is not specifically a poor medium as much as an inefficient medium for conveying emotions.

Text can convey fantastically deep and moving emotions. It just takes a more investment on part of both the author and reader than images.

That's really not true.

We've been drawing faces and other emoticon-like symbols next to our words long before the internet. (Think informal writing like postcards or notes.) People have illustrated their writing for even longer. (Think medieval manuscripts, as an extreme example.)

Even canonically great writers don't (as a whole) limit themselves to words- they write plays that include stage directions, they write poetry that plays with layout and punctuation, they write songs that include melody and instrumental parts.

It's really only some forms of formal writing that limits itself to words to convey emotions.

Writers and their targeted readers have two things that aren't present in internet communication: time and room.

If i was to explain my emotional state and intent on every other message i send, chatting would become rather laborious and having a fluent conversation much much harder.

Indicating that beside my contrary opinion my critique of your comment isn't a try to bluntly dismiss and educate but rather an act of wanting to partake in the conversation in a benevolent way takes me a good third of what I am writing. Or i could just :)

Hieroglyphics

Did people write pictograms in handwritten letters? We had a much easier capability for emoji-like pictograms in the past, but I don't recall people using it.

To somewhat paraphrase my other comment in the thread: Most people on the Internet aren't writing personal letters, and most writing on the Internet isn't deeply personal writing from someone you know and have ane motional bond with. Deeply personal writing isn't something easily comparable to emoji, either.

Fair, but handwritten letters were much longer (because that's what made sense when the round trip time was measured in days/weeks). With multiple paragraphs you can build up a rich emotional context for whatever you're saying.

What will be next?

I don't know. Visual input has the greatest bandwidth and the least latency when it comes to transferring emotions, so pictograms are very effective when it comes to non-technical solutions. When it comes to technical ones, maybe a brain-to-brain interfaces capable of transferring emotions directly to one's mind could eventually challenge the visual interface humans have naturally.

I've literally had people think I was rude and arrogant because I ended my sentences with full stops.

In informal online writing, using full stops has become an optional choice, which means that using full stops requires that you choose to do so, which means that presumably you have something to communicate by that choice.

Generally speaking, using full stops is a sign that one is Very Serious; it's the textual equivalent of how, when someone is angry, they will close doors harder.

That is part of a real convention in active use, influenced by the medium of text on phones and computers. People replace full stops with newlines/message breaks, and over time they start to repurpose the now-unused punctuation for emphasis.

It's not surprising that new linguistic conventions cause confusion, but that doesn't make them something to deride.

Back in the day emoticons/emojis/whatever were just bright yellow cartoons. No race, no gender. It was fine. Combined with ASCII text it was pure communication unfettered by any prejudice. Then like everything else on the internet it all became weirdly political almost overnight :-/

I wouldn't say everything was all fine with the yellow smiley face. It's was somewhat associated with rave culture. I had a teacher in the early 90's that hated the smiley face, because he connected it with ecstasy.

How exactly are differently coloured emojis political or prejudiced?

Slack wants to know my “skin tone”. Why does that matter in a technical discussion? Would it matter in a real meeting or an interview even? It’s only there because some people want to make it matter. I just use the default yellow.

> Slack wants to know my “skin tone”. Why does that matter in a technical discussion?

Slack isn't just for technical discussions.

> Would it matter in a real meeting or an interview even?

Almost certainly, yes, whether or not it should.

> It’s only there because some people want to make it matter.

More accurately, it's only there because it does, in fact, matter to some people. But that's true of every way of expressing any difference of meaning in any communication medium.

In retrospect anything is inevitable. Without Apple trying to sell phones in Japan on Softbank’s network on an OS built to play mp3s it seems unlikely that people would have hacked the Unicode spec to draw smiley faces. That said rich text is the future - hence html.

Emojis far predated the iphone, much less its introduction in Japan, hence the global use of the Japanese term.

As for the Unicode issue: each phone network (and some of the pre-phone Japanese computers) used different code points and had different sets of emojis.

Also is iOS really "an OS designed to play mp3s?" it isn't the iPod's simple OS and really was a version of OS X.

Now, instead or in addition to the BS dozens of emoji they put in Unicode/system fonts every year for the last decade, can we get them to add the powerline glyphs?

In the mean time, this is a good alternative which I've used: https://github.com/ryanoasis/nerd-fonts

But no, they won't add them, because God forbid they actually do something useful. It's obviously more important they add five different skin tones... still don't understand what was wrong with generic yellow. Not everything has to be politicized.

I get that sometimes some sign of emotion needs to be expressed in text, but there were ways of doing that before emojis existed. We had smileys like :-), ;-) and :-(. And tags like <sarcasm></sarcasm>.

I think I've finally made peace with emojis. However, automatic conversion from smilies to emojies still drives me nuts >:|

This reminds me of a misconception a lot of people seem to have about Markdown.

It's not "wrong" to present it to readers verbatim (i.e. not rendered to HTML), since Markdown is a codification of existing plaintext conventions, and was designed to look good verbatim. In other words, though it is often used for, it is not solely a vehicle for generating HTML.

This is the main thing that drives me nuts. I'm fine with emoji, I'll even use them on purpose from time to time, but please let me decide when and how. There's nothing more infuriating than a computer replacing something I just typed with something its developer thought was better.

I had to immediately turn off emoji conversion on Discord, because not only was it annoying, it was wrong - :) was invariably replaced with something that was very definitely the emoji equivalent of :D, and :D turned into what was unmistakably XD. These are very different!!

I'm not sure if you're trying to say these crude emotes were good enough for expressing emotion and we didn't need emoji, but they're really not.

Personally I believe that they are better than emoji precisely due to their crudeness.

I can use ":-)" to punctuate a joke, lower the tension in a critical message, or react to a cute picture. In each of these contexts, the smiley gets translated to different reactions which are still the property of me and the person I'm communicating with, particularly if we know each other in person. By using the plain ":-)" I am expressing my own sense of humour, my own way of being tactful, or my own way of smiling at a cute cat precisely because the smiley is so abstract. Alternatively, when I see one of my friends using ":-)", I will picture their own expressions, their own faces.

However, now with emojis, we are subject to the preferences of arbitrary designers and UX teams working for Apple, Facebook, Google, etc. and the latest trends in the small circle of trendsetters who have any influence. Each reaction has its own emoji or limited range of emojis, and the way of expressing playfulness, empathy, or reaction to cuteness has become commodified and standardised in sets of childish faces which have also become saturated by their overuse in marketing. I am expected to no longer express shock with ":-o", but with an overreacting Munch-scream-lookalike. Laughing now comes in pre-ordained grades, with anything less than "sideways with tears" seen as understated.

In summary, I feel that by being expected to chose between a pre-ordained set of designed smileys we are oursourcing our emotional range.

You're not being expected to do anything, those who can use emojis effectively are free to do so, those who believe a smaller set of emotions work better are free to use them instead. Society is not being poisoned by the mere existence of emojis.

There was incredible amount of stuff you could do in text, like ･゜ﾟ･:.｡..｡.:･'(ﾟ▽ﾟ)'･:.｡. .｡.:･゜ﾟ･. or ε=ε=ε=ε=ε=ε=┌(;￣◇￣)┘

And people started to have auto pasted ascii art.

That’s the point where emoji is a more concise, explicit and less cumbersome system.

We should see emoji as standardization and putting a business tie on chaotic expressions to pass them down the line in a limited amount of bytes.

inevitable, perhaps, but invented long before most people were on the internet (or even born):

Here's AP from 12 years ago talking about the 25th anniversary of the 'smiley':

https://oklahoman.com/article/3128522/digital-smiley-face-tu...

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