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Your brain on emoji

nautil.us

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Re: Your brain on emoji

#161

Post by Tijdreiziger »

xdennis wrote: post #94
nine_k wrote: post #37

Earlier 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.

You're using the Japanese term to obscure. Emoticons were invented first and they are both character based and image based. Later, people started using the term "emojis" for image emoticons and now some people say only text emoticons are real emoticons.

Image emoticons did exist (every 2000s IM app and social media site had them), but largely died off with the popularization of Japanese emoji.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37235639

Re: Your brain on emoji

#162

Post by Tijdreiziger »

aidenn0 wrote: post #9
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.

MSN messenger had a ton of emojis and at the time (around 2000), in my experience, they were used on messenger a lot more than on AIM or ICQ. This is, of course, in the west. As far as Unicode, the impetus for inclusion, while petitioned by Google, was at least officially due to enabling compatibility with Japanese phones where emoji were also quite popular.

Those were emoticons, they developed separately from the Japanese emoji that we use today.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37235639

Re: Your brain on emoji

#163

Post by hammock »

computerfriend wrote: post #85
thrashh wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean iPhones do it purposely to make people buy iPhones. And it works. Apple is full of marketing geniuses. They’re maybe using a lot of dark patterns but they’re raking in profit.

iMessage itself is a feature that makes people want to buy iPhones (maybe). The colour of the text bubble is not.

Ask a teenage girl whether she would want an iPhone just for the color of the bubbles when she texts her friends

Re: Your brain on emoji

#164

Post by kalleboo »

Tijdreiziger wrote: post #160
kalleboo wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wit…

That's the point I was clumsily trying to make.

But now that "custom emoji" on sites like Slack and Mastodon are a thing, the term "emoji" is losing it's meaning and reverting to meaning the same thing we had before.

Re: Your brain on emoji

#165

Post by dTal »

loganc2342 wrote: post #72
hammock wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>FireFox settings should not be showing a sad-face emoji just because it's not my default browser. The irony of using the normative "should" to project your preferences onto Firefox, while expressing a desire that Firefox not do so on you. Also - what about iPhones stubbornly showing green texts from Android messagers? That's not even "I'm sad you're using Android." It's more a passive-aggressive "I'm going to degrad…

The green bubble has nothing to do with with iPhone vs Android, it has to do with iMessage vs a regular text message. iMessages typically use data and text messages typically don’t. Furthermore, iMessages have greater features that obviously can’t be delivered to people who don’t use iMessage, like reactions and effects. iPhone users who use a different messaging app also have green bubbles, as do messages sent as a…

It has nothing to do with iPhone vs Android, it's just a symptom of Apple pushing people into using an iPhone-only messaging app which they refuse to port to Android, specifically to create vendor lockin! Totally different!

Re: Your brain on emoji

#166

Post by eimrine »

vsnf wrote: post #154
eimrine wrote: post #134

What 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 e…

> The nose mark is hard to decipher since it's used so rarely and mostly by elderly computer users, but the dueling smilies (...)

Russian smiles are even more advanced. They use only one sign ")" and "(". Of course you can multiply them.

Re: Your brain on emoji

#167

Post by colpabar »

skummetmaelk wrote: post #145
wildrhythms wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I HATE ellipses and I really don't even understand the purpose. What are they supposed to signify? I know two people that use them constantly and it makes me feel like I said something dumb; like there is some response that is so obvious that I shouldn't have needed to say what I said. I know that isn't their intention, but that's just what my brain makes of the those three trailing periods...

> Single period is normal, surely.

This I understand. Ending a text with a period does make it seem more "serious". I would interpret "yup." to have an almost annoyed tone, and I think that's pretty common. I think it just comes from not needing to punctuate statements given that most texts are single sentences anyway. The end of the text implies the period, adding it implies more.

Re: Your brain on emoji

#168

Post by arrakeen »

layer8 wrote: post #121
kalleboo wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You’re repeating the word “emote”, but “emoji” has no etymological connection to “emote” or “emotion”, it just means “picture character” in Japanese.

i strongly suspect that the reason we call them "emojis" rather than "smilies" is due to the "emo" in "emoji". 100% of english speakers without any japanese knowledge associate the "emo" in "emoji" with "emotion"

Re: Your brain on emoji

#169

Post by skummetmaelk »

colpabar wrote: post #167
skummetmaelk wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People ending their sentences in ellipses are the true passive aggressive ones... Single period is normal, surely.

I HATE ellipses and I really don't even understand the purpose. What are they supposed to signify? I know two people that use them constantly and it makes me feel like I said something dumb; like there is some response that is so obvious that I shouldn't have needed to say what I said. I know that isn't their intention, but that's just what my brain makes of the those three trailing periods... > Single period is norm…

Interesting point about the period. I hadn't thought about it before and now I'll never be able to unsee it.

To me ellipses really just are the passive aggressive marker

> We can do that...

We can do that, but it really shouldn't be necessary, or it's a really dumb thing to do, or I really just don't want to, or you should just do it yourself.

There's always something negative implied that the author doesn't want to say outright.

Then you have people who obviously don't use it like that, which makes it absolutely impossible to interpret their texts. At least if you are conditioned to interpreting it that way.

Re: Your brain on emoji

#170

Post by e40 »

sanitycheck wrote: post #140
e40 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, in slack an emoji response doesn't need to be cleared (so it doesn't count toward a notification count). That is what got me on board.

Which leads to me asking a question and never getting a notification of an answer, because some idiot just thumbs-upped the question. Also, thumbs-upping the question, what does that even mean? It's a good question? I also have this question? The answer is yes? What if it wasn't a yes/no question? o_O

I agree, that's unhelpful. Honestly, never seen that happen in my years of slack use.
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