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Your brain on emoji

nautil.us

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Re: Your brain on emoji

#31

Post by JohnMakin »

Emojis in written text can lose their meaning in translation. Your intended meaning may not be what your audience understands, but I guess that’s inherent in most communication.

I had a bunch of russian coworkers once, and one of them would constantly type “)))” any time I asked him a question. I thought it was some weird cyrillic keyboard quirk and never paid it any mind, until I learned it’s the approximate russian equivalent for “lol.”

Didn’t know what to make of him after that. I guess he thought I was a moron.

Re: Your brain on emoji

#32

Post by Tenoke »

agubelu wrote: post #20
ttoinou wrote: post #8

Did you know ? Eastern europeans end words (without space) with singles characters "(" and ")" to indicate full smileys. Only themselves understand each others and they dont tell anyone about it)))

Why eastern europeans in particular? Is it somehow related to slavic languages? Now I'm curious

I'm guessing they are overgeneralizing since I'm a Bulgarian and I haven't really seen anyone do that.

Re: Your brain on emoji

#33

Post by smegsicle »

e40 wrote: post #17
dijit wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet (and I'm sorry to generalise); Gen-Z "typically finds thumbs up emoji passive aggressive" https://nypost.com/2022/10/26/gen-z-has-hidden-meanings-for-...

First, NY Post? F them and the horse they rode in on. They stoke culture wars at every turn. Second, even if it was true (which I doubt), there are some things which should be ignored and someone believing this nonsense should not be coddled. I'm very liberal, but this is just pure nonsense.

:thumbsup:

Re: Your brain on emoji

#34

Post by veave »

JohnMakin wrote: post #31

Emojis in written text can lose their meaning in translation. Your intended meaning may not be what your audience understands, but I guess that’s inherent in most communication. I had a bunch of russian coworkers once, and one of them would constantly type “)))” any time I asked him a question. I thought it was some weird cyrillic keyboard quirk and never paid it any mind, until I learned it’s the approximate russian…

Russians do that. The first time I noticed it was in Counter-Strike. They would type ))) and the messages would look like this:

Vladimir : )))

So I thought that they "reused" the colon that separated the name from the message. That was my theory at least...

Re: Your brain on emoji

#35

Post by veave »

WaffleIronMaker wrote: post #2

I'm surprised to see the spread of emoji attributed to Microsoft in the initial sentences. It's possible that the author may be referring to the smiley faces in extended character pages, or maybe Webdings, but I generally associate the term 'emoji' with Unicode characters specifically, which I believe to have been petitioned by Google and popularized by Apple. Interesting article either way.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060523-10/?p=31...

Re: Your brain on emoji

#36

Post by [deleted] »

labster wrote: post #29

I’m starting to think that Hacker News is on the wrong side of history on this one. Without the emotional channel, we make more misunderstandings, which leads to more hostile posts. Emoji are becoming a permanent part of written language. I don’t want to see a post full of emoji either, but perhaps a filter that allows one emoji per 20 words would work. Perhaps using a font with black line or grayscale emoji?

[deleted]

Re: Your brain on emoji

#37

Post by nine_k »

aidenn0 wrote: post #12
baz00 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a little unfair to attribute it to Microsoft and MSN Messenger as it was a concept that originated on Japanese phones AFAIK. Also Microsoft's emojis are currently the worst by a mile out of the big tech companies.

The invention in Japan, Europe, and the US of smileys was relatively concurrent, which makes sense because by the late 90s, text-art faces (e.g. ":-)" "(^_^)") were prevalent.

Emoji specifically (絵文字, where 絵 means "picture") are a Japanese invention. They were / are custom pictures, initially monochrome, which Japanese mobile phones allowed to insert into texts.

See https://www.global.ntt/contributing-society-emoji.html

They are not the "smiley" / "emoticon" character art stuff like :-) or =ò.ó= or whatever.

Re: Your brain on emoji

#38

Post by lapcat »

I quit using emoji entirely almost 5 years ago, though I do continue to use a few simple emoticons. https://twitter.com/lapcatsoftware/status/104722329811389645...

My reasons: "There's a method to my madness. You see, gifs are trivially infinitely extensible and backward compatible. Whereas each new emoji requires an addition to Unicode and software updates. And the demand for more emoji is insatiable. That system is not practical or scalable." (I mentioned gifs there because I was known to frequently post gifs.) https://twitter.com/lapcatsoftware/status/105276966084695244...

Re: Your brain on emoji

#39

Post by hbn »

I think the biggest issue with (modern, unicode) emoji has been the different art used between OS/platform. It seems like everyone is kind of converging on making their emojis convey the same emotion as Apple's (which is probably the right move since Apple popularized them, and they're baked into a ton of images that have been circulating for years)

Samsung had some rough emojis for a while. Look at their old "grimacing" face. Or the old cookies emoji that they made saltine crackers. Or their eye roll emoji which was a sarcastic eye roll on Apple, but Samsung had it as a cute smile. I'm sure that caused many a communication issue.

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