Your brain on emoji • Hacker News Board

Re: Your brain on emoji

#181

Post by NikkiA » Thu, Aug 24, 2023, 12:01 PM UTC

aidenn0 wrote: post #62

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.

Yes, the first things called "emoji" (a Japanese word) appeared (unsurprisingly) in Japan. Custom monochrome pictures that can be put inline with text date at least back to ATASCII and PETSCII on Atari and Commodore 8-bit machines respectively. MSN Messenger had pictures that could also be put into text (they were called smileys, but included plenty of non-face pictures), this happened the same year as NTT DoCoMo lau…

I'm fairly sure ICQ had a handful of smileys in 1996

Re: Your brain on emoji

#182

Post by nroms » Thu, Aug 24, 2023, 1:19 PM UTC

brightlancer wrote: post #178

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…

>"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?" What level of neuroticism is this? ¨In other words, enough to send a chill down anyone's spine.¨ I say again, what level of neuroticism is this? If folks…

I have to agree with the parent that on an intuitive level a single-sentence text message ending in a period conveys something pretty strongly. It does a couple things to me: indicating finality, turning an informal comment into a formalized sentence, and just feeling unnecessary thus prompting analysis. furthermore from a grammar perspective most messages are not proper sentences e.g. "yup" or "on my way". In the end we have to adapt our writing to the context, and texting has much more tonal analysis put on fewer symbols —

Re: Your brain on emoji

#183

Post by m0llusk » Thu, Aug 24, 2023, 1:45 PM UTC

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…

commonly also used as tags on forum posts

Re: Your brain on emoji

#184

Post by drdeca » Thu, Aug 31, 2023, 7:29 PM UTC

skummetmaelk wrote: post #169

colpabar wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sometimes I use ellipses when I start out writing one sentence, but then decide I want to say something else instead, interrupting what I was initially going to write with something that contradicts it. I suppose this is kind of silly, because, with writing, I can of course just, delete the initial sentence entirely...

... but, idk, it is often easier for me to write largely as if I am speaking? Where much of the punctuation plays the role of indicating inflection/intonation (I'm not sure what the difference is between those two), and pauses, etc., rather than what they are "supposed to" stand for. For example, the question mark at the end of the above sentence does not indicate that the sentence is a question, but that I want it to be read with the inflection that a question would have.

But maybe that is just laziness on my part. Of course, I know not to do this in formal communications. But, perhaps I should still refrain from being lazy in this way even when writing pseudonymous comments on the internet (and if writing it "properly" would make it not worth it to me to write the commend, than simply not write the comment).