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'Drop of Blood' Emoji, Symbol of the Period, Is Praised by Activists

npr.org

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Re: 'Drop of Blood' Emoji, Symbol of the Period, Is Praised by Activists

#11

Post by plainOldText »

Also:

  > A new "people holding hands" emoji will let users mix and match 
  > different skin tones and genders, with 171 possible combinations.[1]
This reminds me of the article "Code Inflation". [2]

[1] https://www.npr.org/2019/02/07/692260599/interracial-couples...

[2] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=7057573

Re: 'Drop of Blood' Emoji, Symbol of the Period, Is Praised by Activists

#12

Post by blululu »

I'm not really sure if these new emoji are beneficial to the medium as a whole. In many ways the trend toward more inclusive emojis is a good thing (the addition of male/female and skin color variations was a huge improvement), but there is also a cost of emoji bloat.

According to the article, the new blood drop emoji is justified because someone would need to cobble together some sequence of emoji to express the same concept. In many ways this problem is also the very reason that people enjoy using Emojis. The limitations of the medium requires creativity and humor from both the creator and the receiver. Having highly specified emojis can also take away from the fun of this, while also making it more difficult to explore the full set of available emoji.

Re: 'Drop of Blood' Emoji, Symbol of the Period, Is Praised by Activists

#13

Post by dvt »

Outrage culture at its finest. NPR cites a few tweets. Let's analyze: [1] has 13 likes; [2] has 8. No one cares about emojis this much. Real activists (not Twitter keyboard warriors) don't care about emojis, they care about, you know, actual social progress. It took this group like 2 years to get 54,600 signatures when joke petitions like [3] are in the same ballpark. I mean, give me a break.

But articles like this are built from the ground up to (a) get clicks and (b) get people fired up in the comments section to, you guessed it, get more clicks. Journalism, if you can even call it that anymore, is in a sorry state right now. And instead of proving Trump's inane "fake news" diatribes wrong, we have highly-respected news outlets essentially printing garbage like this.

[1] https://twitter.com/PlanUK/status/869632011316727808?ref_src...

[2] https://twitter.com/Cearaa/status/1093430548171841541?ref_sr...

[3] https://petitions.obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/petition/secu...

Re: 'Drop of Blood' Emoji, Symbol of the Period, Is Praised by Activists

#14

Post by black-tea »

Period activists? There are people who dedicate their entire lives to increase human rights for others. Those are activists. What is getting a picture of a drop of blood on my phone supposed to achieve? I know women have periods. What am I supposed to do about it? Keep your problems to yourself.

Re: 'Drop of Blood' Emoji, Symbol of the Period, Is Praised by Activists

#15

Post by _ZeD_ »

Zarath wrote: post #9
piokoch wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the first place it is sad that "emojis", "emoticons", etc. are so broadly used. It only shows how writing skills are deteriorating. Mark Twain or Hemingway didn't need emojis to express sadness or humor.

Are you kidding? Pictures and "emojis" are far more informationally dense than words are. If anything this shows how quickly language is evolving when facilitated by instantaneous information transfer of near unlimited amounts of data.

Don't be fooled by the pretty images.

While painting/photos can express multiple, deep emotions, they are unique. The value added by a copy it's none.

Moreover emojis are for 99%+ simple nouns ("hand", "pig", "dog", "smile"). And for thing that are not nouns, you still need to understand that they are logograms, with a "fixed" meaning. Kanjis are not better than Romans - they are just different alphabets.

And if you think about it long enough you will find that there is already a 1-to-1 mapping behind the "emojis" and the words (by definition, the unicode is the mapping of numbers - the code point, to meanings - the name, and to images - the pictogram, so you can have U+1F436 associated to 'DOG FACE' and ) , so they are "informationally dense equals" between each others.

Re: 'Drop of Blood' Emoji, Symbol of the Period, Is Praised by Activists

#17

Post by mulmen »

dvt wrote: post #13

Outrage culture at its finest. NPR cites a few tweets. Let's analyze: [1] has 13 likes; [2] has 8. No one cares about emojis this much. Real activists (not Twitter keyboard warriors) don't care about emojis, they care about, you know, actual social progress. It took this group like 2 years to get 54,600 signatures when joke petitions like [3] are in the same ballpark. I mean, give me a break. But articles like this a…

The existence of this story and any flaws that may or may not exist in it do not represent the state of journalism as a whole.

Re: 'Drop of Blood' Emoji, Symbol of the Period, Is Praised by Activists

#18

Post by black-tea »

saagarjha wrote: post #5

I'm not sure I understand why people think that we should add the other emojis that were suggested. Emojis are in no way supposed to represent every single thing that you could possibly want to talk about; that's why many of them end up representing other things based on context (for example, the eggplant or peach emojis). The blood emoji is fine, but the soiled underwear is just…weird. That would be like asking for…

The regression towards caveman technology continues. Soon the general population won't remember how to form sentences any more. If they find they have to resort to multiple emojis or, heaven forbid, English to describe their feelings then they'll just have to become "activists" themselves.

Re: 'Drop of Blood' Emoji, Symbol of the Period, Is Praised by Activists

#19

Post by black-tea »

petepete wrote: post #10
piokoch wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the first place it is sad that "emojis", "emoticons", etc. are so broadly used. It only shows how writing skills are deteriorating. Mark Twain or Hemingway didn't need emojis to express sadness or humor.

Here's a page from one of Twain's manuscripts. I think he'd have made good use of Emoji. https://biblioklept.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/twain_ma881-...

Drawing a picture on a manuscript is not the same as copying a picture drawn by someone else.

Re: 'Drop of Blood' Emoji, Symbol of the Period, Is Praised by Activists

#20

Post by logicchains »

black-tea wrote: post #18
saagarjha wrote: post #5

I'm not sure I understand why people think that we should add the other emojis that were suggested. Emojis are in no way supposed to represent every single thing that you could possibly want to talk about; that's why many of them end up representing other things based on context (for example, the eggplant or peach emojis). The blood emoji is fine, but the soiled underwear is just…weird. That would be like asking for…

The regression towards caveman technology continues. Soon the general population won't remember how to form sentences any more. If they find they have to resort to multiple emojis or, heaven forbid, English to describe their feelings then they'll just have to become "activists" themselves.

Look on the bright side, it might allow people who don't speak each other's written languages to communicate better than ever before.
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