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Your brain on emoji

nautil.us

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Re: Your brain on emoji

#141

Post by tgv »

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?

It's not an emotional channel, at least not purely. And you can express that very well in text, too. You just need to cut the irony and sarcasm. For the (rather dumb and contrived) examples from the article

* Unfortunately, her cake she was terrible.

* Her cake was such a failure, I had to laugh.

* She made a nice cake.

Re: Your brain on emoji

#142

Post by Macha »

skhr0680 wrote: post #120
teknopaul wrote: post #117

How can American authors write text that says Microsoft introduced... then a word like "Emoji" that is so obviously Japanese Authors still see the world through a lens, that until its big in US, it does not really exist, and then associate it to the US company that copied it first.

I'm guessing the author is refereing to emoticons from MSN Messenger. I don't think the term "emoji" gained popularity in the west until the iPhone came out, and made emoji wildly popular because of the one secret trick you had to do to enable the keyboard on non-Japanese phones.

Also emojis are a derivative of emoticons (or smileys, as they were called if you went far enough back): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji

Re: Your brain on emoji

#143

Post by wildrhythms »

d--b wrote: post #92

Emojis are used mostly in 2 ways: punctuating a sentence so that it’s tone is less ambiguous. A shortcut for an emotional state that is not dissimilar to writing “haha” “ew” or “meh”. As a IRC-chatting teenager in the mid-90s, I am somewhat an expert in emoticons and can’t possibly imagine a world where emojis didn't exist. But I m surprised no one mentions the “!” or other stylistic tools like all caps. These are “c…

An article on this topic I like:

Are Your Texts Passive-Aggressive? The Answer May Lie In Your Punctuation

>"And we found consistently through many experiments that 'Yup' with a period resulted in responses that were more negative. So people thought 'Yup' with a period was less friendly, less sincere, and so on."

>"I actually really don't like getting text messages that end in periods because it always feels so harsh and passive-aggressive," said Juan Abenante Rincon, 24, a social media manager for Adidas. "Like, are you mad? What's going on? Like, did I do something wrong?"

https://www.npr.org/2020/09/05/909969004/before-texting-your...

Re: Your brain on emoji

#144

Post by codq »

hammock wrote: post #45
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…

))) is just a beaming smile... derived from :) but without the eyes. Not exclusively Russian Separately, I remember years ago doing social media competitive audits and someone saw >>>>>> in there and thought it was errant text. E.g. "Taco Bell >>>>>>>". Of course what it means is Taco Bell is better than everything

Kinda adds a whole new layer to the drone metal band sunnO)))

Re: Your brain on emoji

#145

Post by skummetmaelk »

wildrhythms wrote: post #143
d--b wrote: post #92

Emojis are used mostly in 2 ways: punctuating a sentence so that it’s tone is less ambiguous. A shortcut for an emotional state that is not dissimilar to writing “haha” “ew” or “meh”. As a IRC-chatting teenager in the mid-90s, I am somewhat an expert in emoticons and can’t possibly imagine a world where emojis didn't exist. But I m surprised no one mentions the “!” or other stylistic tools like all caps. These are “c…

An article on this topic I like: Are Your Texts Passive-Aggressive? The Answer May Lie In Your Punctuation >"And we found consistently through many experiments that 'Yup' with a period resulted in responses that were more negative. So people thought 'Yup' with a period was less friendly, less sincere, and so on." >"I actually really don't like getting text messages that end in periods because it always feels so harsh…

People ending their sentences in ellipses are the true passive aggressive ones...

Single period is normal, surely.

Re: Your brain on emoji

#146

Post by codethief »

I still don't understand why emojis had to be added to Unicode. Sure, it helped with adoption but now we've got descriptive glyphs ("beaming face with smiling eyes") but every font displays them slightly or sometimes even very differently. In some cases, depending on what phone/font my conversation partner uses, we might interpret emojis completely differently and we won't even know!

Re: Your brain on emoji

#147

Post by sethammons »

> It turns out that a world freshly speckled with [emoji smile] is not really such a changed world after all.

I've recently discovered there is a generational gap in smiley usage :)

If you are younger, my ":)" above can be taken more as a condescending smirk that puts down the reader. If you are older, it is just a smile and signifies that I'm, well, what a smile usually means: I'm being friendly, happy, non-threatening.

I apparently now have to watch how I use smileys because younger people have started interpreting the symbol, imho, incorrectly :(

(I am unaware if a similar proviso extends to the sad face above)

Re: Your brain on emoji

#148

Post by fouc »

sethammons wrote: post #147

> It turns out that a world freshly speckled with [emoji smile] is not really such a changed world after all. I've recently discovered there is a generational gap in smiley usage :) If you are younger, my ":)" above can be taken more as a condescending smirk that puts down the reader. If you are older, it is just a smile and signifies that I'm, well, what a smile usually means: I'm being friendly, happy, non-threaten…

Actually even on IRC in the 90's, sometimes :) was sarcastic, really depended on context anyways. 5% chance of sarcasm.

Internet is a highly sarcastic world so it's not a surprise that people eventually perceive it to be more sarcastic than it should be I suppose.

You can just add a - to make it unambiguous. :-)

Re: Your brain on emoji

#150

Post by wlindley »

I just read them all as "tiny little indistinguishable blob." Too small to see what they are, and other than the smiley-face and a few others, completely devoid of any meaning. Someone sends me an email and all it says is, "[blob] [blob] [blob]" —? I can't be bothered to read your mind, please re-send using words.
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