One of my earlier bits of tinkering when I was younger was jailbreaking my iPhone and finding the code in the Japanese iPhone OS build that enabled emojis and using it to enable emojis on my American iPhone. If I recall correctly, I was then able to send them to other iPhones, but of course no one could reciprocate. I thought I was pretty cool! Most people didn’t really understand their point, and it wasn’t until they were added to the American build where people warmed up to them.
Your brain on emoji
151–160 of 184 posts
Re: Your brain on emoji
#152I 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.
While I sympathize with finding the imagery too small to read quickly, I think this is an elitist attitude that you'll find increasingly separates you from your younger peers. You don't have to lace your own sentences with emoji, but to declare sentences you read that contain them to be devoid of meaning, I think you're prejudicially shutting down lots of dialogue.
Re: Your brain on emoji
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
The claim was that Apple is giving someone a degraded experience. How is "Android user doesn't like their Android phone" evidence of a degraded experience for an iPhone user?
The reason why kids in USA don’t want Android isn’t the phones themselves but the way their messages get presented by Apple’s software. No teenager wants to be flagged as poor to their peers by a bright green bubble. Imagine if Microsoft had done this 20+ years ago when they were on top. All emails sent from a Mac would be displayed in magenta Comic Sans when opened on Windows. Wouldn’t that have been a blatantly ant…
I understand, but that is a different discussion. "Alice doesn't want to appear poor to Bob" != "a degraded experience for Bob". If Microsoft had displayed emails in magenta Comic Sans they would have been harder to read, and thus a worse experience for the recipient, manipulative but still not emotionally manipulative - compare, say you install Linux on your former Windows PC and Microsoft change the boot loader to a war photo of a crying child being torn from her crying parents by an enemy solider and the text "I'll miss you so much".
Re: Your brain on emoji
#154What is the difference between "the cake she made was terrible :-)" and "the cake she made was terrible :-("?
The nose mark is hard to decipher since it's used so rarely and mostly by elderly computer users, but the dueling smilies read to me like malicious intent vs agreeable disappointment. I.e.,
"The cake that horrible coworker of mine made was terrible, and everyone hated it. I delight in this schadenfreude." vs "The cake my loving and adorable girlfriend made me for my birthday was terrible, and while I appreciate the effort, it was hard to stomach. "
Re: Your brain on emoji
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
It could be argued that the user above chose to use Firefox. They chose to use this in their minds inferior tool or a tool with an undesirable feature. They made that decision. > A bad workman always blames his tools –Old proverb
Is the argument here that developers should no longer test their sites in FF?
I'm arguing people can use whatever they want. No one is making anyone use the browser of their choice.
Re: Your brain on emoji
#156How 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.
Emoji means pictograph in japanese. I think it's fair to say that Americans "coined" the term as a name word for the characters where as the japanese were simply describing the characters literally.
Re: Your brain on emoji
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because it's wrong. Emoji is a Japanese word, which is the biggest hint they didn't come from Microsoft. (And yes, its a specific subset of Unicode characters, though that proper use is getting diluted by people using it to refer to any and every inline pictograph in text, even non-Unicode ones, a use more similar to "emoticon" from the 90s… that word seems to have faded into obscurity, largely supplanted by "emoji")…
On chat applications: In Finland no one used AIM and everyone used messenger. I suspect this was the norm also elsewhere in Europe. I am talking about Messenger 4.6 that came built in with windows xp and its later versions, not the business version.
In the Netherlands, MSN Messenger (commonly abbreviated just 'MSN') was essentially a monopoly, although at that time it was only used by young people (older people still just called each other on the phone).
With the rise of smartphones though, it ended up being supplanted by WhatsApp, with the ill-conceived migration to Skype killing off most of the last stragglers.
Re: Your brain on emoji
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because it's wrong. Emoji is a Japanese word, which is the biggest hint they didn't come from Microsoft. (And yes, its a specific subset of Unicode characters, though that proper use is getting diluted by people using it to refer to any and every inline pictograph in text, even non-Unicode ones, a use more similar to "emoticon" from the 90s… that word seems to have faded into obscurity, largely supplanted by "emoji")…
> Emoji is a Japanese word, which is the biggest hint they didn't come from Microsoft. (And yes, its a specific subset of Unicode characters, though that proper use is getting diluted by people using it to refer to any and every inline pictograph in text, even non-Unicode ones, Emoji as originally created/used in Japan were not Unicode, Unicode emoji only came many years later, so referring to non-unicode emoji as em…
But the MSN Messenger emoticons from Microsoft were not those Japanese emoji. That term was only popularized with the iPhone.
Re: Your brain on emoji
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
The reason why kids in USA don’t want Android isn’t the phones themselves but the way their messages get presented by Apple’s software. No teenager wants to be flagged as poor to their peers by a bright green bubble. Imagine if Microsoft had done this 20+ years ago when they were on top. All emails sent from a Mac would be displayed in magenta Comic Sans when opened on Windows. Wouldn’t that have been a blatantly ant…
I understand, but that is a different discussion. "Alice doesn't want to appear poor to Bob" != "a degraded experience for Bob". If Microsoft had displayed emails in magenta Comic Sans they would have been harder to read, and thus a worse experience for the recipient, manipulative but still not emotionally manipulative - compare, say you install Linux on your former Windows PC and Microsoft change the boot loader to…
Young iPhone users genuinely complain that the green bubble is searingly bright and ugly compared to the iMessage blue which is darker and less saturated.
I know the whole thing is kind of silly. But it clearly does have a surprisingly strong effect on people’s perceptions. And Apple has some history of deliberately rendering competing products as ugly (Mac OS X used to show Windows network shares with a grim icon of a beige CRT monitor).
Re: Your brain on emoji
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Web forums like UBB already had what we called "smilies" in 1998 with graphical emotive faces you could include in your posts, so that concept of image emotes predates the Japanese emoji. Making them part of the OS and character set so they could be used anywhere and not just on a web forum was what made them the emoji we know today, and what caused them to catch on. But now services like Slack and Mastodon have what…
> Making them part of the OS and character set so they could be used anywhere and not just on a web forum was what made them the emoji we know today, and what caused them to catch on.
That's not quite right. The Unicode emoji we use today are directly descendant from the emoji that were on Japanese phones.
That's how emoji ended up on our keyboard: Apple added them to the Japanese iPhone keyboard to be compatible with Japanese carriers; users in the west discovered this and started enabling Japanese input on their phones to use them; finally they became so popular that Apple (and Samsung etc.) also enabled them for non-Japanese keyboards.
If not for the original Japanese emoji, chances are that every website would still have their own smileys, instead of there being a single, interoperable set.