Why so much emoji nonsense?

Phake Nick via Unicode unicode at unicode.org
Thu Feb 15 20:19:22 CST 2018


2018-02-16 04:55, "James Kass via Unicode" <unicode at unicode.org> wrote:

Ken Whistler replied to Erik Pedersen,

> Emoticons were invented, in large part, to fill another
> major hole in written communication -- the need to convey
> emotional state and affective attitudes towards the text.

There is no such need.  If one can't string words together which
'speak for themselves', there are other media.  I suspect that
emoticons were invented for much the same reason that "typewriter art"
was invented:  because it's there, it's cute, it's clever, and it's
novel.

By the standard of "if one can't string word together that speak for
themselves can use otger media", then we can scrap Unicode and simply use
voice recording for all the purposes. →_→


> This is the kind of information that face-to-face
> communication has a huge and evolutionarily deep
> bandwidth for, but which written communication
> typically fails miserably at.

Does Braille include emoji?  Are there tonal emoticons available for
telephone or voice transmission?  Does the telephone "fail miserably"
at oral communication because there's no video to transmit facial tics
and hand gestures?  Did Pontius Pilate have a cousin named Otto?
These are rhetorical questions.

Tonal emoticon for telephone or voice transmission? There are tones for
voice based transmission system
And yes, there are limits in these technology which make teleconferencing
still not all that popular and people still have to fly across the world
just to attend all different sort of meetings.


For me, the emoji are a symptom of our moving into a post-literate
age.  We already have people in positions of power who pride
themselves on their marginal literacy and boast about the fact that
they don't read much.  Sad!

Emoji is part of the literacy. Remember that Japanese writing system use
ideographic characters plus kana, it won't be odd to add yet another set of
pictographic writing system in line to express what you don't want to spell
out.
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