emoji's are part of text communication in the same way facial expressions and body language are part of oral communication. Yes, sometimes they'll be misinterpreted, but the same is true of text alone anyway (were they being sarcastic? Are they angry?)
I think you're jumping to conclusions too quickly. It is true, emojis can be an important part of communication but until the same graphics start being used on all platforms, devices and services, emojis are a quite bad medium for communication. My phone, my browser, whatsapp, slack, I think twitter too and so on use their own graphics™ which have subtle differences.
That's exactly what emoticons were meant to substitute: non-verbal communication. The problem is that some use them as hieroglyphs.
Well, that's those people's problem. They won't be able to communicate with anybody outside of their group, so they must eventually give the style away or learn to tone it down when talking to strangers.
Not differently from any other kind of group idiom people created at any time in history.
Why not? Why do you care about the effort other people put into things that they care about? To such an extent that you’ll put effort into criticising things which are of literally no relevance to you?
> Clear text is just so much less confusing.
Yeah nah.
Just because you’re not hip to it doesn’t mean it’s meaningless. I don’t understand most slangs, whether in my own mother tongue or in foreign langages I more or less understand.
That doesn’t mean I’m going to assert cockney rhyming slang or verlan is “meaningless”.
The problem with emoji is that there is no dictionary, no standardised meaning or interpretation guidelines; no unified, context-dependent cues that everyone subconsciously agrees to. When you try to communicate non-verbal cues using them, it works well because there is a general understanding of what is meant though even there, cultural differences sometimes get in the way. Something like a smile cuts across cultures pretty universally.
When emoji start getting overused to the point where you have to draw meaning from the skin tones involved in a handshake, that's a step too far IMHO. This is precisely why we struggle with deciphering hieroglyphics and precisely why emoji must remain a supplement to language, not a replacement for it as many use.
Are you able to define what exactly these mean and why we should devote time and effort to ensuring that each one has the correct skin tone and gender representation?
Wether we should devote time making sure they are the correct skin tone is orthogonal to my original comment.
Eggplant and the one hundred emoji have well known meanings now that I'm sure the creators were not thinking of when they were designed. I'm sure someone somewhere complained about having vegetables and numbers in the standard at the time though.
By the way, we don't struggle with deciphering hieroglyphics - it's a phonetic alphabet, not a pictorial language.
That does not mean that people are free to redefine words as they choose and change their meanings entirely. That is how you get a dialect and then a different language.
With emoji, there is no shared understanding precisely because there are simply too many, often with no meaning and when meaning does exist, it is either vague or dependent on culture. This is absolutely not the case with written language.
There's nothing wrong with new dialects and new languages.
>With emoji, there is no shared understanding precisely because there are simply too many
A lot of people are already using emojis where everybody in the stream of communication shares understanding. Using an obscure emoji is possible just like using an obscure word is possible.
>often with no meaning and when meaning does exist, it is either vague or dependent on culture.
Using text for communication has the exact same feature. Words can be vague or can dependent on culture. Words can have two meanings. Words can be sarcastic or patronizing just like a thumbs up or smiling emoji can be.
By your reasoning, we should ask British people to stop using X's and O's at the end of their texts to indicate the tone of the message. And Japanese people should stop using ASCII emojis that border on artwork to indicate emotion.
No. And two phrases don’t a rant make. You’ve written about 3 times as much in response.
> The problem with emoji is that there is no dictionary, no standardised meaning or interpretation guidelines; no unified, context-dependent cues that everyone subconsciously agrees to.
Have you never encountered slangs once in your life? Because not being understood by everyone is quite literally the point.
> When emoji start getting overused to the point where you have to draw meaning from the skin tones involved in a handshake, that's a step too far IMHO.
“Emoji are used a lot therefore emoji are bad” is certainly a take.
> This is precisely why we struggle with deciphering hieroglyphics and precisely why emoji must remain a supplement to language, not a replacement for it as many use.
You seem to understand hieroglyphics about as well as you understand emoji, or slang, or langage in general.
And we actually understand hieroglyphs really really well. Unlike, say, Linear A, or Etruscan (that one is rather interesting because the script is a known alphabet, but since we know nothing of the langage that’s not at all helpful, in the same way English and Romanian both using the Latin script… is not actually helpful to deciphering Romanian knowing only English).
We should strive for less people overall in software with a better sense for quality, than getting everybody to pile more junk on this dumbster fire that is computer science.
Another story is when you write with them and instead of a formatting tool become your words.