Never mind the naysayers: emoji are a vital part of online communication

Author Philip Seargeant discusses his new book, <em>The Emoji Revolution</em>

Read the whole story

 

[fitten]

"Ars: What about all the grumpy curmudgeons writing OpEds about how text-speak and emoji used by kids today are "ruining language"? "

The "grumpy curmudgeons" are those who either got into tech late or really just barely brush tech communications. We used emoji (although not called that at the time) quite a bit back in the mid 80s... we didn't have nearly as many of them defined... various smilies (and there were text documents that listed lots of different kinds that you could find on various places on the 'net) were about it.

 

[Molehill]

Counter-arguement: Emoji are an imprecise method of communicating and leave the recipient guessing as to your meaning.

Or as George Orwell explained so clearly in "Politics and the English Language", ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

[wallinbl]

Is there a real difference between any of the following icons?



edit: the subtleties are lost to me within my iOS system. How can the the nuance be expected to communicate across to someone using a different system?

I can hardly ever interpret the emojis people use. Of course, the general population has a limited grasp of the words they use, so that's also problematic.

I was that kid who argued with teachers and professors about the wording of their questions. I never understood how everyone else saw the intended meaning in spite of the obviously ambiguous wording.

On the spectrum, perhaps you are?

Wasn't a thing when I was a kid, and neither was ADHD, which I was diagnosed with as an adult. I can be very poor at reading people's emotions, and I tend to parse text literally, which is what caused the issues in school. If the text (or answer choice) of a test question is ambiguous, I have almost no ability to discern the likely intention.

 

[BrianZ]

Counter-arguement: Emoji are an imprecise method of communicating and leave the recipient guessing as to your meaning.

I mean it's not like you should only use emojis. Words+emojis is significantly more clear for tone than either alone

I completely agree. Humans are wont to read tone into written communication, and will interpret based on experience, current mood, subject matter, etc. All or none of which may be relevant or correct.

Well-chosen and appropriately used emoji can help alleviate some of that, especially in informal communications.

I prefer to communicate in text clearly and precisely and leave all the snark and sarcasm for face-to-face. Except in cases where snark, sarcasm and trolling are expected. I realize I am a minority in this endeavor.

You have no control over what someone else attributes to your written words.

Even in face-to-face communication we rely on the non-verbal for a significant portion of the conveyed communication.

But, you do you. The rest of us will figure it out regardless.

Or people can, you know, learn to properly express themselves in text by actually learning grammar, and proper composition.

Willing to bet you are interpreting the previous as snark or passive-aggressive, and you would be right. See what happens when people properly choose their words and phrasing?

But we can control how people interpret our words without the need for emojis. Authors have been doing it for centuries quite successfully. Now can we control how people who no longer have a proper grasp on grammar because they are so obsessed with writing in 120 or less characters, and using emojis to fill in the spaces? Nope, but that isn’t anyone’s issue but their own. It‘ s kind of like my kids calling me passive-aggressive when I use ellipses in my texts, because for whatever reason they don’t realize it translates to ‘and so on’ or because you are taking out unnecessary words, or adding an extended pause.

And if you took the previous paragraph as sounding like I am some old man shouting at clouds, good. See proof again you can completely communicate what you want in words.

Actually, all I did was critique your poor grammar.

 

[TheWerewolf]

I think you may be misusing the term 'vital'. It CAN mean 'living' in which case yes, it's vital as it's a growing and evolving communications tool...

But it can also mean 'essential' or 'irreplaceable' - and emoji are definitely not.

 

[Veritas super omens]

Is there a real difference between any of the following icons?



edit: the subtleties are lost to me within my iOS system. How can the the nuance be expected to communicate across to someone using a different system?

I can hardly ever interpret the emojis people use. Of course, the general population has a limited grasp of the words they use, so that's also problematic.

I was that kid who argued with teachers and professors about the wording of their questions. I never understood how everyone else saw the intended meaning in spite of the obviously ambiguous wording.

On the spectrum, perhaps you are?

Wasn't a thing when I was a kid, and neither was ADHD, which I was diagnosed with as an adult. I can be very poor at reading people's emotions, and I tend to parse text literally, which is what caused the issues in school. If the text (or answer choice) of a test question is ambiguous, I have almost no ability to discern the likely intention.

As you're post indicates quite clearly, it can be difficult for many to parse exact meaning from any verbal text. The only solution of course, if you want exactitude, is mathematics. My left brain quarrels. I delight in the comedy afforded by nuance. E.g. One of the major staples of comedy is the double entendre.
Situation and context are, of course, extremely important. A casual conversation with close friends requires a totally different approach to phraseology than a discourse in the comments in Q & A in a scientific convention. Emojis provide a potential yet feeble means of providing that context IMHO. Context requires a shared background. In the future emojis will be more useful as people will have more experience with them.

 

[Emilio Kléber]

I still don't get why these kids keep saying "lots of luck".. what the damn hell is that!

 

[Papewaio]

Well if you’re the comic guy you aren’t feeling much...

 

[Sensath]

I'm so glad I am going to die in approximately 20 years. We're regressing back into the pictorial era.

 

[Wheels Of Confusion]

I'm so glad I am going to die in approximately 20 years. We're regressing back into the pictorial era.

I'm so glad you're going to die, too. We could do with fewer ignorant judgmental types like yourself who don't understand that language isn't a ladder and the medium of text isn't the top rung.

 

[Papewaio]

I'm so glad I am going to die in approximately 20 years. We're regressing back into the pictorial era.

I'm so glad you're going to die, too. We could do with fewer ignorant judgmental types like yourself who don't understand that language isn't a ladder and the medium of text isn't the top rung.

That’s just because you are a revolutionary Wheelist

 

[jnv11]

Counter-arguement: Emoji are an imprecise method of communicating and leave the recipient guessing as to your meaning.

Phonetic writings are also imprecise. What is a "bat"? An animal or a sports implement? By contrast, the picture of a baseball bat is a baseball bat.

When you are in an airport in some foreign country, you don't need to know how "bathroom" is written in that country. You only need to look for the universal picture of male and female.

If I say "the bat is at bat" you know what I'm saying.

but:
Am I saying the same thing there or am I saying "beat that bat with the bat"?

Both are basically nonsense. First, the phrase "the bat is at bat" makes no sense except possibly in a cartoon or someone dressed up as a mammal that can fly. Second, " " depicts a mammal that can fly and then the emoji for the sport of cricket which consists of a cricket bat and a cricket ball on most platforms. That emoji has nothing to do with baseball.

 

[KBGB]

There is something but everyone is missing, you don’t actually need to know why other people value or enjoy emojis, just that they do.

If someone understands something you don’t it’s foolish to argue it’s because they are stupid or otherwise inferior for it. Just be happy other people are enjoying themselves & don’t let something so trivial ruin your mood.

That being said I don’t get emojis & also never tried, but that is because I genuinely dgaf

 

[MNP]

Counter-arguement: Emoji are an imprecise method of communicating and leave the recipient guessing as to your meaning.

I mean it's not like you should only use emojis. Words+emojis is significantly more clear for tone than either alone

I completely agree. Humans are wont to read tone into written communication, and will interpret based on experience, current mood, subject matter, etc. All or none of which may be relevant or correct.

Well-chosen and appropriately used emoji can help alleviate some of that, especially in informal communications.

I prefer to communicate in text clearly and precisely and leave all the snark and sarcasm for face-to-face. Except in cases where snark, sarcasm and trolling are expected. I realize I am a minority in this endeavor.

Is this sarcasm?

 

[xizar]

Parsing through the comments here, virtually all the emoticons I see are fairly unambiguous to me (even those with kana or otherwise beyond the limited 256-character ASCII set) whereas most of the emoji are too small for me to see without zooming my browser up to about 150% and when I do, they to really mean anything to me other than "there is a face here... maybe it's smiling?"

So, I reiterate: No.

 

[Urtho]

I am a curmudgeon. Emoji almost always make the meaning of what ever is trying to be conveyed harder to understand. That is with or without words. I wish I could just block them and get the word version of what is being sent as half the time I can't even decyfer what the emoji are, never mind their meaning in the sentence.

 

[poltroon]

One of the things I find incredibly potent about talking in emoji is their ambiguity. It's especially useful when you don't know what to say, or don't have something meaningful to add, but want to be supportive. You have no words for someone who is struggling, but you can send a heart. Or a dragon. Or a puppy. Or soup. And if the person knows you, they'll likely interpret it in the way that they most need to hear it at that time. This is hard for words to do in quite the same way.

Over time, any group can develop a specific language as well that is often private to the group. This isn't limited to emoji; most online communities have a bit of secret/lore text lingo that refers back to some incident in community history. Emoji are just shorter to type.

 

[poltroon]

Although: one of the most challenging aspects of emoji is how different they are platform to platform. I remember I thought I was sending a cute, energetic emoji to someone and their side displayed a picture of the same idea but so differently that it really impacted the meaning of what I was trying to send.

 

[Romann.AV]

I am totally blind, use a screen reader, the reader can't read aloud Emoji & thereby prove the lie to the old addage that a picture is worth a thousand words.
It's worth SFA if it can't be given a transcription (AltText) for a screen reader to read to those for whom vision is an issue.
Old & can't see the tiny print? You won't be able to see that itty bitty icon either.
Going blind & have to magnify the screen to +300% to see standard 14 point text? Those pictures may not scale worth a damn.
Blind & can't see the pretty pictures at all? If your reader can't find AltText for it then they aren't worth the bandwidth.
99.999+% of WebDevs can't be bothered to transcribe the images on their pages (I'm looking at you ARS & your lists of unlabeled graphics) & thus leave folks like me with nothing to listen to & comprehend.
Unlabeled buttons, undescribed links, (JavaScript) code that hides content & only reveals it after you click a "same page" link, the list is nearly infinite of all the ways they leave artificial & *#&$ing pointless hurdles in the way for anyone not gifted with perfect sight, hearing, & motor skills.
I wish it were possible for Emoji spewing goobers to be forced to use a screen reader rather than a monitor for a month, that way they would find out the hard way just how crappy those *pictures* can be...

I'm not blind, but my jabra bluetooth headset 's readout feature does describe my wife's emojis to me as spoken text. the capability exists.

 

[BrokenOmelette]

I can't find an emoji displaying my contempt for emojis... I prefer a complete, written sentence with punctuation and a beginning & and end the best way to display ones message. Whenever someone responds to me with an emoji to whatever I have to tell, I end the conversation there and then. In fact, they have already done it for me. If an emoji is the only way how you can show what you have to say don't respond at all.

 

[Kergonath]

Is there a real difference between any of the following icons?



edit: the subtleties are lost to me within my iOS system. How can the the nuance be expected to communicate across to someone using a different system?

I can hardly ever interpret the emojis people use. Of course, the general population has a limited grasp of the words they use, so that's also problematic.

I was that kid who argued with teachers and professors about the wording of their questions. I never understood how everyone else saw the intended meaning in spite of the obviously ambiguous wording.

That’s not a problem with emoji though, that’s a problem with the people. You can use words in a incomprehensible, imprecise or ambiguous way as well, yet nobody is getting all angry about letters.

The way some people talk is weird and annoying. Just don’t talk to these people

Part of the appeal of emojis (beyond simple emotion markers) is that it’s a game. Who cares about the exact words they had in mind when they wrote it? Nobody uses only emoji anyway, there’s always literal context.

 

[Findecanor]

A side-note:

I can't even read half of the emojis in this comment section without squinting. The text is set at a normal size for reading Latin letters and because the emojis also are characters they don't get any larger.
By being larger, emoticons in ASCII art have an edge over Unicode-emoji in that way.

I remember when bulletin boards on the web started to auto-translate ASCII-art "smileys" into images: these images were also often slightly larger than text, making them easier to read. The number of them was also limited to about a dozen.

The word "emoji" and using them on cell phones originates from Japan, which has text largely formed from pictographs* that are more complex than Latin letters, and thus, it was natural to use a larger text size for them.

 

[Akemi]

Meanwhile, I choose to use words and refuse the use of emojis. I will forever exclude those that don't make the same choice.

 

[Luddite Curmudgeon]

This brings to mind an image somebody posted on Facebook a few years back. On one side, there was a series of emojis, ostensibly created to say something. On the other side, there was an image of hieroglyphics. The inference is that things really haven't changed much.

Still, there is something to be said about a string of emojis of which some might be similar, but of a different meaning to the author. To me, it's reminiscent of Cantonese Chinese. Or any other tonal language where words and meanings are distinguished by inflections and tonal changes. The written portion is a bear to learn.

 

[Nalyd]

Meanwhile, I choose to use words and refuse the use of emojis. I will forever exclude those that don't make the same choice.

 

[PoweredByHentai]

Eh, medieval manuscripts include a lot of random, silly art in its margins as one of the earliest forms of memes to mankind.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ISOK-XtvYs

 

[Kergonath]

This brings to mind an image somebody posted on Facebook a few years back. On one side, there was a series of emojis, ostensibly created to say something. On the other side, there was an image of hieroglyphics. The inference is that things really haven't changed much.

That image is stupid. If you interpret it as saying that we’ve regressed back to 2000bce, you a bunch of logical fallacies:
- hieroglyphs were the standard way of expressing a structured language (well, at least initially, let’s ignore hieratic writing for now)
- hieroglyphs had well-defined meanings and are closer to a Chinese ideographs system (nobody thinks we’ve regressed just because those are still around)
- emojis are silly pictures you add to unimportant random stuff you put on social media and in no way comparable in terms of usage
- we have lots of other ways of saying things, which are not removed just because we can also write silly pictures
- we’re not intellectually superior to ancient Egyptians anyway, so there’s no reason why we couldn’t like similar things, like big buildings with colourful stuff on them, or silly pictures.

Still, there is something to be said about a string of emojis of which some might be similar, but of a different meaning to the author. To me, it's reminiscent of Cantonese Chinese. Or any other tonal language where words and meanings are distinguished by inflections and tonal changes. The written portion is a bear to learn.

That’s the thing: emojis are not a formal language. You don’t learn it. The worst case is that a community assigns some meaning to them and uses them as a code. It’s not different from slang, which also is unintelligible to the uninitiated and does not prove that words are somehow inferior.

 

[Viki Ai]

I'm one of those stuck-in-the-mud, dyed-in-the-wool language traditionalists. That's why I believe everyone should just stick to speaking Proto-Indo-European!

And none of this new-fangled "writing things down": that will just lead to rioting in the streets and a complete societal collapse!

 

[BloodNinja]

Counter-arguement: Emoji are an imprecise method of communicating and leave the recipient guessing as to your meaning.

So is natural language, especially when misspelled

To wit, what does this mean?

Flying planes can be dangerous.

 

[BloodNinja]

Is there a real difference between any of the following icons?



edit: the subtleties are lost to me within my iOS system. How can the the nuance be expected to communicate across to someone using a different system?

It's almost as if synonyms are a thing.

 

[Deleted member 553147]

They still make terrible movies.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-Q9iozzThg8

Maybe I’m the only one in the world to say this - but the Emoji Movie was pretty good, I don’t get why people hate it. It’s kind of cute, the story is ok, the morals of it are fine (the value of friendship, finding your own path in life, accepting other peoples quirks, standing up against oppression - what’s not to like?). I liked it, my kids loved it. There are definitely many much worse movies out there that I wouldn’t want my kids to watch. Why all the hate?

 

[BloodNinja]

Man, comments are full of old-men-yelling-at-clouds.

I'm a bit old to be using emoji for full-on communication, but any given Discord server or Twitch chat you'll see teenagers and early twenties people communicating relatively complex thoughts using emoji alone, or more often complementing small numbers of words with an emoji or two to communicate a complex thought.

 

[BloodNinja]

Or people can, you know, learn to properly express themselves in text by actually learning grammar, and proper composition.

[...]

people who no longer have a proper grasp on grammar because they are so obsessed with writing in 120 or less characters

That's... rich.

 

[loginnombre]

Stop trying to make "fetch" happen.

You think emojis "haven't happened", what the fuck are you taking to be that separated from reality? I would like to get your dealer's digits!

 

[BloodNinja]

A vital part? To who? I'm not saying they're useless, but really, how often do you see them used?

To whom*

 

[BloodNinja]

Counter-arguement: Emoji are an imprecise method of communicating and leave the recipient guessing as to your meaning.

Phonetic writings are also imprecise. What is a "bat"? An animal or a sports implement? By contrast, the picture of a baseball bat is a baseball bat.

When you are in an airport in some foreign country, you don't need to know how "bathroom" is written in that country. You only need to look for the universal picture of male and female.

If I say "the bat is at bat" you know what I'm saying.

but:
Am I saying the same thing there or am I saying "beat that bat with the bat"?

Or your trying to say 'Oh yeah, oh yeah, uh uh-oh'

You're*

The number of curmudgeons bitching about emoji destroying the language in spelling- or grammar-challenged English is hilarious.

 

[PoweredByHentai]

Man, comments are full of old-men-yelling-at-clouds.

I'm a bit old to be using emoji for full-on communication, but any given Discord server or Twitch chat you'll see teenagers and early twenties people communicating relatively complex thoughts using emoji alone, or more often complementing small numbers of words with an emoji or two to communicate a complex thought.

Wow, the emojis actually summarized the Dune movie.

 

[BloodNinja]

Wow... I gotta give some of my (f'd up possibly input into this..).. and I didn't even read the comments (which I never skip).. but .. (And come to think of it dig up the PW and login!)

I'm sorry!! I am old school and emojis and whatever else can kiss it. Type. Like proper understandable stuff, I don't even care what language! A smiley face is great, a frown ok, a side-ways looking WTF I'm good with.. but I'm not figuring out what the hell half this crap means!

I apologize again. I'm old. Or at least I feel that way.

Communication requires both parties to do their part. It's not someone else's fault if you don't know their emoji, or the words they use. Or are you one of those red-hatted neanderthals who like to make fun of more literate people for using "big words"?

 

[PoweredByHentai]

Wow... I gotta give some of my (f'd up possibly input into this..).. and I didn't even read the comments (which I never skip).. but .. (And come to think of it dig up the PW and login!)

I'm sorry!! I am old school and emojis and whatever else can kiss it. Type. Like proper understandable stuff, I don't even care what language! A smiley face is great, a frown ok, a side-ways looking WTF I'm good with.. but I'm not figuring out what the hell half this crap means!

I apologize again. I'm old. Or at least I feel that way.

Communication requires both parties to do their part. It's not someone else's fault if you don't know their emoji, or the words they use. Or are you one of those red-hatted neanderthals who like to make fun of more literate people for using "big words"?

I'm reminded of Huckleberry Finn for some reason. Especially Huck's argument with Tom about why the French don't speak English.

 

[BloodNinja]

I am a curmudgeon. Emoji almost always make the meaning of what ever is trying to be conveyed harder to understand. That is with or without words. I wish I could just block them and get the word version of what is being sent as half the time I can't even decyfer what the emoji are, never mind their meaning in the sentence.

Decipher*

Jesus fucking Christ, people.