Can You Speak Emoji?
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 6 ต.ค. 2024
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Is emoji a form of speech?
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As the popularity of emoji has risen over the last decade, many of these little symbols have taken on lives of their own. We use them to portray emotion that can otherwise get lost in a text-based conversation. But does that mean that these little pictures qualify as language?
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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i get irrationally angry when i see a string of emojis
+C Beary (CBeary) ⇨⚽⚽࿊࿋⇦
🙂🙃💞🔄↕️⬇️↘️
+C Beary (CBeary) I get rationally angry because half of them are broken for me and I can't seem to coax my PC to learn them so they're meaningless unicode squares.
:D ?
+Wesley Foxx Maybe it's time for that free(?) Windows 10 upgrade?
*is relaxed*
He pronounces it gifes
*immediately tenses*
*jifes
+David DeCorso *ʒaɪfs
+FizzyG I almost passed out from the shock.
yes
+FizzyG he does it on purpose, ironically, to mock the silliness of the two sides of the debate. in which he succeeds as demonstrated by you.
I hate emoji. Praise our emoticon overlords. ヽ༼, ͡ຈ ͜ʖ ͡ຈ,༽ﾉ
🖕🏻
***** (ﾉಠдಠ)ﾉ︵┻━┻
How do you make Emoticon🤔
username kwest You type them yourself or look them up by name.
+XerxesTexasToast ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
emojis became part of our daily life, I mean typing: "this episode was funny 😒" and typing: "this episode was funny 😂" ...
and writing the wrong emoji sometimes can cause some tangible relationships to end.
+Muaz Osman reminds me of an argument i had a few years ago where instead of "Well don't come then :(" i wrote "Well don't come then :)"
Understandably my friend thought i was glad they weren't coming
Mallorey Fennessy my sister actually got mad and blocked me over a wrong emoji hhhh
it happens
2:16 I actually stated out loud, "Did he just say Jifes?"
I am SO glad this episode was not entirely created in emoji.
Just when there's the announcement of an "Emoji" movie.
I was wondering the exact same thing! ✋😂
+Erelde Its been around for awhile, but its just been in the news again
If I made the emoji movie then I would have the art style be the same as Apple's style. And also have the plot have the phone updating with one emoji resisting change.
9️⃣®️🅾️💲💲
i'm surprised you went this whole episode without even mentioning wingdings
+Nathaniel Jurcago
Wingdings is different, though; they don't mean anything.
Says you!! They could mean whatever you want. Or simply be glyphs or glyph-like.
But they don't mean anything to the majority of people. Emojis were made to represent something, wingdings was not, therefore, no one uses them as such.
dude i don't think you know what wingdings are. a majority of them have words or phrases associated with them. like "hand" or "scissors" there are literally wingdings for those things. and while not all of them clearly represent something, who are you to say they weren't made to represent something? AND they can be up for interpretation.
Nathaniel Jurcago
It was a Veritasium video (I don't have the link, but you can search it up on TH-cam) where I found out that wingdings were made for the purpose of "prettying up" papers before images could be easily added to text documents.
Emojis are different from wingdings because they were both designed from the ground up to do two different things. Yeah you CAN use wingdings for some other purposes, but that doesn't make them languages the same way emojis are. You can use basic shapes as a form of communication, but that doesn't make them letters. No one else uses them as such!
I do think that emojis are a great example of just how complex communication really is and how we take for granted how easy it seems to be for us humans to interpret each others ideas.
Not a single mention of Tom Scott?
+Crozix Tom Scott actually doesn't like being "the Emoji guy"
to be fair, I'm not sure Tom really wants to be known as the Emoji Guy :p
+Dan McDougall Just another reason to do it
No mention of Kappa? Having an emote that instantly implies sarcasm or silliness is invaluable.
As a linguistics student and millennial, I personally believe emojis and "text speak" to be one of the most interesting linguistic developments in the last few hundred years. It proves the incredible knack the human mind has for creating expression. As we started texting, we were dropped into a place where we couldn't be sure we'd be understood, and we struggled to ascertain if the other person was being sarcastic, joking, or angry. Our own languages became somewhat foreign. But just as communities of deaf children have been observed spontaneously generating full sign languages, people texting created their own markers for meaning. For example, ask any young person what the difference is between "yes" and "yes.", or between the number of period used in an ellipses. Emojis are an extension, almost serving as "adjectives" to modify the tone of whole sentences😁 Tone was added to text in a manner that no one decided on, but rather we as a population generated to help us express ourselves
They are a form of punctuation, especially emoticons. I mean, the modify a sentence in a way that is necessary for written but not spoken communication, just like a ! or .... They, much like ! and ? stand in for tone just like emoji and emoticons. They are an integral part of modern texting and I am 100% convinced that punctuation is the best way to describe them.
I feel like there was an opportunity to reference the Elcor from Mass Effect, like how the Elcor literally clarify their tone before they speak because their paralanguage isn't understandable or translatable to other species.
People not understanding the "jife" joke hurts
Kaomoji is pretty much the best kind of emotion expression I've had yet.
Emojis are like that thing that happens when two people who speak different languages and can't understand each other try to communicate.
However, they can communicate through tone of voice... It's a little imprecise, but it's what emojis work off.
Ancient Egyptians had Hieroglyphs. Today we have our Emoji's📱🖊
2:10 Haha "animated jyves"...you are such a troll, Mike! xD
To me, Emoji are just seasoning. Spice to add to speech.
boom, exactly
like a Spicy Sentence Sandwich!
But CAN they be more?
***** Not Really
+Joseph Larson Sure, but the question is, SHOULD they? I don't think so.
Argument that emoticons are hard to type doesn’t hold water. Any method used to make emojis easy to type could be easily applied to emoticons. On to of that, simple emoticons are often easier to enter than any emoji.
What's also interesting is emoticon orientation. Region affects language, and language affects keyboard layout, and keyboard layout affects how you type.
The merging of West and East keyboards created modern emoticons. The west used things like :) :( :D and the like while the east used things like ッ. Eventually the two sides created things like OwO uwu °-° •w• >///< up to the complex ones that we have on our phones nowadays like (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*.✧ or ಠᴥಠ and the like.
Really interesting video! So one of the things about emoji that often gets brought up against its use as a universal kind of language across cultures is not just the racial issues, but also the fact that different emoji have different meanings in different cultural contexts. And it's not just the eggplant you allude to and people repurposing different emoji, it's that emoji really started out in specifically a Japanese context. So the foods and such are Japanese, but also the buildings (there's a love hotel one that I've seen get used for hospital) and the expressions (the "crossed X arms in front of the face" means "no good" in Japan, but not here).
But if we're thinking of emoji as being the textual equivalent of gestures, maybe this isn't really an issue, in the sense that different cultures use different gestures, too. I already mentioned the crossed X arms thing, but that's an example of a gesture that doesn't conventionally exist in American culture. But there's also differences in the ones we do have meanings for: like, nodding to mean yes may seem obvious here, but it means no in a number of other cultures (e.g. Turkey, Bulgaria, a bunch of the Middle East). Beckoning to someone with palm up in North America to signal them to come closer is fine, but it's reserved for calling animals in some East African cultures; to beckon people, you turn your hand over and beckon with your hand down.
So in a way, if emoji are treated as paralinguistic, and akin to gestures or body language, it's not surprising that we see variation in emoji usages across cultures. Like all language stuff, we end up treating them differently across different backgrounds. It just means that we should expect people to codify them all the same way across the world, even if we do end up all getting the same intended emoji appearing the same way eventually. Reinterpretation of characters is pretty much inevitable.
🔥 episode.
yes
I like to use emojis as a sort of emotional punctuation. You know, sort of as a way that you can tell what feeling is behind a particular statement. In regards to the limits of emojis, for some reason, there isn't an emoji that captures confusion. I'd use it all the time if there was one while live tweeting Quantico.
+MariusIoannesP :S
+MariusIoannesP 😕
⁉️
❓🤔
I'd argue the original set of faces wasn't "Caucasian" but Japanese.
it's gif not jif. you can't change what people say
+Roshkin 🎣
gif, jif, whatever. but it's definitely not "jife"
I mean the same way someone can't say that it's definitely pronounced "jif" you can't say that it's definitely pronounced "gif" because like you said you can't change how people say it and some people do pronounce it as "jif".
Jif peanut butter
Arachno Philia That's a joke though it's a reference from a previous video
I developed a text emoji habit over the years. Like when typing I'll add in ~dies~ or ~so tired~ or ~glows~ or other "emotes" to the end of the text (I guess something I picked up from playing MMOs and just evolving shorter emotes to the end of text to give more context).
I find they can be far more specific in communicating feeling to written text (though I also use emojis a lot too :3, sometimes in combination).
One thing I've been thinking a lot about is taking these text additions and using them in professional work (I'm a game designer). I actually saw emojis being used in a game recently (Enter the Gungeon), but the far more cartoony aesthetic seems like it can handle that better than a more serious RPG. They are just so powerful in helping shape how text is interpreted ....but they also have a bit of stigma attached to them (less serious, for kids, things like that).
So emoji are a kind of proto hieroglyph? We need a new version of the Rosetta Stone.
That word of the year emoji isn't even a laughing face; it's a tear-of-joy face
jifes! YES! That's exactly how it should be said! I'm just glad my keyboard doesn't have emoji.
I find emojis useful when interacting with foreigners online livechats. When combined with Google translate, and context is pretty effective.
I like the inside jokes or hidden meanings some emoji take on. My wife and I both talk of being "tired pandas", so we use 🐼 to mean "I'm tired".
I'M A COMM SCHOLAR AND I'M ACTUALLY DOING RESEARCH ON EMOTICONS RIGHT NOW!!!!!!! :D
I would not say that emojis are a language, but instead (assuming they are similar to emoticons) function as nonverbal communication.
According to most modern Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) theories, specifically J. B. Walther's Hyperpersonal model (summed up= we have greater control over what we communicate in CMC as opposed to Face to Face [FtF]), emoticons function as Nonverbal cues for CMC, kinda like how smiles and thumbs-up are nonverbals for FtF.
Provine and friends (2007) found that the people they studied commonly put emoticons in place of punctuation (at ends or beginnings of sentences). And Walther and friend (2001, I believe) found that emoticons function as emotional cues for messages, and also that negative emoticons [ :( ] could make positive messages negative, but positive emoticons [ :) :P ] had no positive impact on negative messages. Other scholars (I forget names and dates because it's late here) found that there was a common usage regarding when and where people used emoticons in chat rooms.
Much the same as smiling or angrily shaking your fist are not language per se, emoticons and emoji function as a form of nonverbal, emotion-giving add on to CMC. I would need to do a lot of research to have a discussion as to emoticon/emoji as performative communication (BUT WOULD LOVE IF SOMEONE LINKED ME TO ARTICLES PLEASE AND THANK YOU), but I can safely say that emoticons and emoji are the smiles and frowns of texting and chatting.
Also, if anyone reading this has any links to scholarly articles they could recommend, I would love you forever. Please and thank you. I want to study emoticons and emojis and CMC so much and I'm so glad that my University has a professor doing research in that field. Thanks for reading :)
I'm old fashioned, even though I'm 23 I'd rather type than use emoji.
I rarely find a proper occasion to use them.
I prefer reaction pictures, I like how they can make people laugh while actually expressing what's in my mind.
+manamaster6 I was like that too, but over the years of texting I slowly adopted.
I consider texting as its own form of communication, totally different from other writing. As you said, Mike, it's not meant to be strict writing, it is a casual conversation given text-form.
We all probably know somebody who texts in a very nice, proper English way. And every time you talk to that person, it feels like they're a little upset with you, or maybe are trying to hint they don't want to talk to you.
My mom does this, and it's weird because my texts with all of my peers are almost exclusively in all-lower-case, with select words and letters capitalized and periods and punctuation used or not used to convey the proper intonation and meaning. Sometimes, an emoticon works better. Other times, emoji is required. For me, at least, it's a subtle art that is actually pretty similar to how humans verbally communicate.
For people that can't or won't learn that art, texting with them feels stilted and artificial, even though speaking with them in real life is perfectly genuine.
I will not REST until emoticon, kaomoji and emoji use is considered acceptable, and eventually commonplace in academic papers!!!
In all the discussion here about which part of speech or writing emoji most closely resemble, I feel an important aspect of the emoji which radically distinguishes it from other types of spoken or written communication has been overlooked. Many, many people prescribe a lot of meaning and contextual information to an emoji, and not just in terms of how it's used as a part of speech. Emoji, like the crying laughing face, the heart eyes, or the businessman, mean something beyond their direct meaning in communication, and even beyond their contextual meaning in communication. Show me the crying laughing emoji and I won't just tell you what I think it means, I'll tell you what I think of the emoji itself. I'll say "Yeah, the smiling crying guy! I love that guy!". In short, we endow the emoji with a personality.
We can see this happening to an even greater extent with the Facebook sticker. The sticker, really a more complex and interactive emoji, often have explicit narratives and personalities. Take Pusheen, or Business Fish- we have opinions on the personality and life of those 'characters'.
The Emoji then is something very new to English, and while I'm not a historical linguist I would suspect is pretty uncommon for language overall. We take our relationship to the abstract form of an emoji, to the narrative and personality an emoji, and implement it in speech, where it adds meaning to our communication based on the speaker and listener's relationship with that emoji. In that sense, perhaps we can compare the use of an emoji to a more simplistic version of the historical practice of commonly referencing legendary narratives like Shakespeare or Homer to communicate your meaning- relying on a common understanding of the narratives and personalities being referenced?
+Michael Turvey
That's a really cool thought. I wonder if it would be comparable to say that the emoji is sort of like a character that we have act out a part to help us convey meaning. Sort of like in a tv show we don't just like the actions of a character we like the character themselves or sometimes even extend it to the actor.
I'd love to know if you think that I'm getting close to what you mean.
I also wonder if this pertains to how people just feel about words because I know plenty of people who HATE the word 'moist.' or is that different from what you were talking about originally?
Anyone else still loving this in 2024? Hope you're doing well Mike!
I got so excited when I saw this pop up under my subscriptions tab. Thanks for making such awesome videos!
If any of you haven't seen it already, that Oneohtrix Point Never video is 'Boring Angel', and It's surprisingly powerful.
You hit that whip pretty good. My question is, can you dab just as good?
I think the most important aspect of emojis are the fact that they represent an international language; people may not understand what a text message means, but they will definitely understand the sentiments of an emoji. Have emojis been used for this sort of communication? Not very much, if at all. It's not like we purely communicate with people with emojis, as you talked about, but I feel like the potential is definitely there to have emojis become a way that we can communicate with each other globally.
I still can't see them on my computer. It's squares all over the place...
In the book Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C Clarke presents us with an evolved emoji state, where people have the tech necessary to (instead of waving their hands like today) draw holograms in mid air, on the spot. This opportunity has organically incorporated itself into the communication and into the languages themselves. In the future that Arthur envisions, all the languages melted into one, unified, practical language, but emoji carry the personal level of communication because they can be used to transfer emotions, symbols, identities, technical details, explanations... Some time ago i became interested in usage of emoji. I have noticed, especially in instagram comment culture, that we use emoji much in the same way that Arthur has explained. If we think about it, even with the present level of control over emoji, we have managed to incorporate them in our language. And also we can now use them in multiple ways. I remember the time before emoji when we used simple textual smileys. They were used much more rarely, and they were only used in context or to stress the level of some feeling. Never for illustrational or identificational purposes (flags, accessories, metaphoric symbols). What you will often find in the comments is people typing one or two metaphorical emojis which can sometimes tell a joke or recall a feeling in the readers mind. (picture of a cow with the caption emoji unicorn) Often i try to think about how i would explain a joke like that with words.
One of the best idea channel episodes I've seen in a while.
People complaining about emoji not being part of language forget that from Ancient Egypt there have been equivalents to emoji in written language. I am talking about hieroglyphs which were not their actual written language, which is a totally different set of letters and words called Hieratic . Hieroglyphs were a more artistic way to express the written word, like current emoji.
Omg the set looks like an emoji bomb site
I agree that emoji can be used to convey the tones, expressions, and gestures that text may not convey, when they are being used with actual words and sentences. But, when used by themselves, they seem to limit communication, and remind me of Newspeak in 1984. Although I doubt emoji would replace written words, do we really want to go backwards to pictographic writing like Egyptian Heiroglyphs?
Emoji, emoticons, etc are simply the art of typography trying to emulate the art of cartooning.
Compared to previous videos, you seem especially calm and soft spoken on this one. I don't know if that is actually real or a figment of my imagination, but it has an ASMR-like effect on me. Please, continue talking.
Had to look up "cromulent' Not even my spelling checker knows it so I'm happy to have been educated. ;-)
Okay, so for kaomoji I think like part of it's that non-Japanese aren't usually familiar with those other symbols in that they're not used regularly. To begin with, a Japanese keyboard alone provides more access to various symbols so that's a thing. Also, Jpn people actually aren't typing each character in to make a kaomoji at least not anymore. You copy+paste it or you have an app on your phone that just inserts them. On my Android devices I have a Japanese keyboard called Simeji and it comes with both an emoji input option/dictionary and a kaomoji input option/dictionary. If you just type in a word like happy or sad, it will even pop up with a suggested emoji or kaomoji to replace the word with too, so I think like part of the differentiation between emoji and kaomoji and usage is more related to technological resources or even awareness of resources between people both inside and outside Japan.
Emoji though being only one color though wasn't really a consideration of race, or at least it wasn't a thought when it was in Japan. I don't think anyone assumed that anyone was yellow or anything either, but it's like a cross between like kaomoji and a generic happy face which is almost always yellow. It's also like just simple because the yellow face could represent anyone. I mean, if you took a happy face sticker and gave it to someone would you expect that person to be angry because the happy face sticker wasn't depicting a particular race? The concept of it being that specific I don't think occurred to its creators because it was just supposed to be a face. It probably only became a noticeable problem when someone distinctly started making realistic skin toned emoji and then it became a problem.
Also, I would like to note for this that in Japan, emoji are not really popular anymore. They're out of fashion and like Jpn people are kind of surprised we still use them. If people use any expression at all, it's kaomoji or they use decomail which is like other kind of decorations that are tied to a specific carrier or something that you use to express how you feel in a message or keitai mail.
They also use the messaging app Line which has stickers which comprise of still images or animated stickers which basically do the same kind of thing as gifs and memes only they're branded by actual artists and companies and are official where you can buy them. But like generally speaking the popularization of Line mainly came out of the Touhoku earthquake back in 2011 because it was a product that Naver had internally that the employees of the company ended up being able to use to communicate with each other over wifi even when cell service was down. They released it to the public a short while later it became its own thing, so it's kind of interesting that it's a communications app but also one that came out of a need for communication during a time of crisis. While that's great, I'm rather enamored that the later innovations of the stickers being popularized coupled with its core communication usage in theory would allow me to try to keep positive and stay playful even when things are going wrong.
That said though because Line's gone international, it has a set of proprietary emoji that also pop up when you type as a suggestion instead of the word you were going to put in or even stylized text images, but like that's more the direction that the home country of emoji is going in, and honestly for me I actually prefer it. Facebook has added similar features to its Messenger app in the form of free stickers likely to compete with Line because a lot of Line's stickers are paid because they use proprietary copyrighted characters.
But like whether I use Messenger or Line, I love stickers and prefer them over emoji or even Kaomoji because I find them to be much more personalized and expressive. Kaomoji are even more expressive just because there isn't as much of the limitation that emoji have and the whole library of them that I have access to is pure gold, but sometimes they also seem too cute or don't have enough personality as I want to express for the context of the conversation I'm having. For me, that's where the stickers come in because the stickers for Line or FB Messenger are branded and you download or buy the ones you want, so which ones you choose are a direct correlation to you and your personal interests. Like I have one friend who loves the Business Fish sticker set on Facebook. That's her thing and that's so her. I like cute things and geeky stuff so I'll do things with like cute animals or are geek references like comic books. DC used to sell Line stickers, and I have a Batman set that I love using and I love Batman so those are sometimes appropriate for some friends. I have some friends who are bigger anime fans so then I use those stickers instead when I talk to them. Others I play games with so I'll use like Pokemon stickers or Animal Crossing or something. They even have Star Wars stickers, which are useful for when I'm like watching or talking about the film or referencing something from them because they even have the "I love you" and "I know" as separate stickers. It's more me and more my personality.
I am surprised that you didn't bring up British youtuber Tom Scott's work with emoji and his creation of an emoji keyboard.
Oh and not really related to emoji, but what IS that album with the boxes with an X in the center? I need to know.
Words can't express the meaning behind the smiling moon emoji as succinctly the smiling moon emoji itself.
I think emoji kinda work like a new "word group", sort of like an "Adjective +"
+AC-Wesley
_ I was thinking about this as well, which I suppose is address in the video, but more explicitly for me the idea of a communications hierarchy. So I would guess in this case:
Communications
_ Speech
_ _ Language, in this context necessitating grammar
_ _ _Words and such
_ _ Emoji aka adjective+?
_ _ _ Also, how does Emoji being a 'controlled' means of expression fit them among other adjective+ pictographs?
_ I'm not sure how it would be arrange, if possible; unless perhaps arbitrary, where describing more the people who form the hierarchies. \_(ツ)_/
For me emojis are like punctuation marks. I never use them as whole messages and I know nobody who does, but instead of a exclamation/question mark. They're verys helpful to overcome the cold enviorment of "vanilla" texting.
I really don't like emojis, for the sole reason that it only conveys what I want to say or represent in a comical/silly way which I consider distracting and ugly on the rest of the text, but I as phone user have little control over. But despite my views, companies and culture have adopted them so enthusiastically that it's becoming impossible to avoid. These days whenever I type a simple emoticon " :) ", it automatically 'corrects' it to a "😀" against my will. The message these two formats convey is not at all the same though, with emoticons feeling, at least to me, more authentic, real and serious in a good way whenever I send or receive them. They allow me to apply to and clearly convey a much wider spectrum of feelings.
For example I can use " :) " in many situations, including a "see you later! :)" or a "I hope you get better soon, :)", it's the same symbol but it can mean a sympathetic smile or a feel-good smile. It's not ambiguity, it's flexibility, depending on the context.
I was describing one emoji's meaning to my mum and I realised I could only describe it using memes.... what is my life
I feel like a conversation like this happened with the Star Trek TNG episode "Darmok."
10:13 "What do y'all think"? Really? "You guys" was perfectly acceptable.
I think a more intelligent point to make would be if the reductiveness of the emoji plays into the internets desire to reduce things to memes and steriotypes.
The idea that a black guy can't use a white representation of the default emoji, or that a white guy can't use an asian representation of an emoji because "oh boo hoo, it's not the same skin color as me and therefore cannot accurately represent or depict me or my feelings", is stupid. The only reason we have race tags in emoji is to appease people who are afraid of associating with the other, and who don't understand what Unicode is supposed to be for. Emoji's were always yellow, and they should stay that way; the first cheering emoji, bulging muscle, and pointing finger were all yellow. Race codes are not only unnecessary, but only serve to pit people against each other, and separate themselves from the other. If you're too insecure about who you are to use a yellow smiley face, or point to something with a yellow finger, keep it to yourself and shove off. Don't go and muddy up the character space for the rest of us by forcing the consortium to add race to emoji >.>
Hey Seth, I'm assuming that you're white. I'm not saying this to imply that your whiteness is a bad thing; only that it can inhibit you from seeing how accurate representation does actually make a big difference to people of color such as myself. When I first started using emoji, they weren't yellow, they were white. I didn't think much of it, but when different skin tones were added I did feel a sense of ownership over the emoji I sent. This gets into a much bigger issue of representation in media, but I'd encourage you to try and understand what issues like this are like from a different vantage point.
"Emoji's were always yellow"
That's not true at all.
I feel like a look into sign language within this discussion would have been interesting.
It's bad that I've been so completely inundated with SJW rubbish that the moment he started talking about "PoC's" not being represented in emoji's I reflexively rolled my eyes and groaned, despite being more than okay with them adding the extra skin tones when I first heard about it.
+Vincent Freel I'm in the same boat. It's sad that through association, pretty reasonable things now give off a stretch of cringe.
Any discussion of Emoji would be incomplete without mentioning +Tom Scott, the accidental emoji expert.
Makes me think of American Sign Language (ASL) and its use. Very clearly a language with its own vocabulary and grammar, but one both lacking in audible utterances as well as lacking (largely) in a communicable written representation of those utterances. Where emoji might be said to augment English, English characters could be said to augment ASL.
Just wanna say that you are such a great comunicator that people with me that don't speak english that well, understand you perfectly.
Emoji as an emotional signal, is exactly why I don't tend to use Emojis all that much. In my normal speech I tend to stay monotone and subdued unless I have a point of Interest. My friends think I don't like Emoji but honestly I only reserve them for times of importance. I've never quite accurately been able to describe this feeling towards emojis until watching this episode
Writing was invented to communicate, but until recently writing couldn't replace conversations, and when it did, we needed to use it to convey all things we can while chatting face to face, like facial expression and tones of voice, thus the need for emojis
I think this episode should really have included some discussion of sign languages.
+Laiel “Kasha” Shepherd I would like you to elaborate on that. I am not seeing the connection between sign languages and emoji (at least not beyond the superficial similarity between sign languages and gesture), but it sounds interesting.
I just feel like there are so many emojis now finding the emoji I want is more difficult than finding Wally
I love these videos, but does anybody else get really drained by the pace? It's a 12 minute video and once Mike starts making his point, he never really comes up for air. It's kind of exhausting.
+Tyveris - I actually prefer this pace. If I need to, I can pause or rewind but I rarely find myself doing that. Conversely, someone who talks really slowly leaves me thinking "get to the point!" the whole time.
+Just Some Guy -- Me too( to what Just Some Guy -- says), I'll admit.
I think you can't compare texting with face to face interactions. Reading body language is a very primitive form of communication previous to verbal communication.
Perhaps emojis are becoming a new form of communication comparable with the oriental system. But it could be just a passing trend.
I am in the middle of rereading Snow Crash and a line jumps out at me in response to this video. "To distill fact from the vapor of nuance" I am continually amazed by our brains ability to take something abstract like emoji and distill that as far as using it as a complete language. Regardless as to the success of the endeavor, it still is amazing.
I think emoji should stay at least the same height as normal characters, if not the same width too. In the sense that emoji provide a gesture supplement to written text transmitted via computers and the internet, I don't think they should "pop out" of the text like some of these HUGE ones I've seen. Emoji should be sprinkled in, around and between textual language. Huge emoji completely defeats that purpose, requiring that it be its own separate message or that it ruins the look of text by having a giant picture forcing the text on the same line down and leaving giant awkward whitespace inside a single line or an entire paragraph.
everytime he pronounces GIF wrong it completely throws me off
and no, I will never get over it :D
Me too. I'm not mad, just... Disappointed. 😂
+ItsMeRuttu same^^
I'm surprised he didn't mention the stigma around emoticons involving maturity
Using emojis to talk to people reminds me very much of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. That, and when you mentioned how it was a sort of "embryonic language" made me think of it even more as hieroglyphics, and how they could be described as the early stages of language. Using images to convey meaning, and even story at time, was how hieroglyphs were used, and I feel like the same can be said of using emjois to communicate.
+CaesarPlays
By the time that hieroglyphs started appearing in very detailed stories were already closer to idiographic which means they referred to only one word and some of them even had parts of the glyph that were for pronunciation so I think it's a little premature to compare them just yet. In the future if emojis have a grammar and set meanings then sure, but not quite yet.
Jillian T Ahh, okay, fair point ^_^
I really love your more restrained use of accompanying gifs in this episode, I'm finding it easier to follow along with the lessened use of them - they add a lot, but sometimes it's nice to be able to focus on Mike's animated talking :)
Emoji remind me of those children's books where “difficult” words are replaced by small pictures - it's funny how more and more fun-focussed our society gets, with games, pictures instead of words and humour everywhere. It's like we're all trying to be children and adults at the same time.
Emoji also seem to take the idea of phonocentrism (= primacy of speech over writing) even further, which I don't mind for text messages but would mind if, say, newspaper articles were to be written like that.
I wonder if they could be considered as a sort of slang too?
i cant believe you didnt bring up carrie fishers confusingly pure emoji tweets
emoji could be the new hieroglyphics
I like that this entire video can be used to describe basic language and conversation. Look at twitter, the slightest ambiguity leads to mountains of responses. Ambiguity has been born from our desire to reduce the number of words in every correspondence.
Between that and the fear of defining one another we've begun to create a fresh new world where communication does not necessarily end with information or any increased sense of clarity.
I love the intentionally weird pronunciation of GIF. Well done, sir! I think I'll start doing that as well-- I can irritate both sides of the fence at once! :)
Well, all I've learned is that Happy Turd is really _very_ Happy!
What Caucasian people are that shade of yellow?
So Emojis are really discriminating against people with functioning livers?!? That's Liverism!
+iamaniPod Springfielders.
+iamaniPod What are you talking about? Apple, Google, etc. added the yellow "default" skin tones after the fact. Before that, all the humanoid emojis (i.e. the ones that didn't just represent emotions) were indeed white, and given the sheer number of emojis out there, that was kind of a problem. The controversy was justified, imo.
+Sam “Duster” Hartman Yea, white cause it was white and black. Thats like saying :) is white because the background of youtube is white.
Matthew Jackson …What? No. Go to 2:23 in the video. That was Apple's original list of emojis introduced in iOS 5.0. All except for the man with turban are white. I'm not making things up here.
Also, in Japanese you can simply write the kanji "笑" ("warau", or sometimes only the first roman letter "w"), which means "laughter". The same for "怒" ("Oko" = angry) or "泣" ("naku" = sad/crying).
Thus, you basically convey your mood without using a phonetic imitation of f.ex. laughter and without using emoji. :)
One thing that I don't feel like you adequately covered was how emojis only adequately convey positive or over dramatic emotions, and how the lack of emojis is often used to convey such emotions
I've oft thought (sometimes after being frustratingly misunderstood by a terse/rushed txt i've sent) that as we invest more and more in the written or typed word (email, txt etc etc) that one of the huge lackings of "pure text" is language intonation and missing non-verbals that we communicate so naturally when we speak verbally to one another. I've credited Emoji's as being able to fill this void... and i don't think they do completely but their ability to concisely communicate a feeling or shared memory associated to that tiny icon image is certainly filling part of that critical communication gap in my mind.
The twitch.tv emotes are the best, and you get peoples custom emotes when you sub to them
Blocks of psuedo-words controlled by large, powerful groups who can--intentionally or unintentionally--influence the entire discourse by adding or subtracting said psuedo-words?
Wow! That's doubleplusgood!
One of the things I like about emoji is that the remind me of signifiers in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. For example, if you want to make an English version of how hieroglyphs work, you might see the word CT and it might mean cat, coat, or cot. To reduce the ambiguity, Egyptians included a classifier hieroglyph to indicate what category the word was in--so instead of just CT, you might see CT with a cat face. I think emoji add a lot of clarity to textual speech in part by solidifying and classifying the statements in the utterance in much the same way.
i guess im out of touch i dont know what half the emoji mean
the date on the calendar emoji in this video is my birthday...
Many people hate texting because "it is so impersonal and you cant convey emotion, gestures and intonation" ... and many people are hating emoji because "its ruining language." ... [face-palm emoji]
If emoji could be spoken, it would be like a cross between sign language and fortune telling, given you would be drawing cards to try to convey meaning to the other person.
As someone who frequently puts on these videos to listen while walking around doing stuff, I just have to say that when you mentioned the book Emoji Dick, it was very necessary to have the image of the book with the subtitle there ...
Without seeing that little whale, I never would have guessed what it was actually a reference to.
😂😂😂😂
Jifes...? SAY IT AGAIN!! (ง ͠° ͟ل͜ ͡°)ง
While I don't use emoji per say, I do use a lot of smiley faces while texting. It does help convey the emotion and intent behind a message that is lost when simply reading something as to it being said in person. For example:
"You're so mean." - Simple statement of fact/opinion. It looses the context tone, inflection, and gesture.
"You're so mean. ;-P" - The wink-tongue out face instantly adds a non-seriousness to it. The inclusion of three characters gives vast amount of information, and I bet you can even imagine context of the situation this one line took place in. (A friendly rebuttal to a joke, perhaps?)
"You're so mean. >:(" - Three different character, and a completely different meaning. One that conveys genuine anger at the person.
One thing that does interest me about this is the tone that one reads them in their head. Without the smiley I read them in a neutral tone, but the inclusion of the smiley makes the tone I read it in different, even if the face comes after the actual sentence. It's like my brain retroactively goes back and readjust the tone without me even noticing it. It reminds me very much of 'garden path' sentences; my favorite being "The old man the boat." It makes no sense until you realize 'man' is synonymous with 'staff' in this instance. Granted, the retroactive correction is more jarring in a garden path sentence, buy I hypothesis it's the same process that corrects the inflections when smileys and emoji are used.
(On a semi-related note, the use of the text smiley as compared to emoji is an interesting aspect of pareidolia. Seeing faces in things that aren't faces. Ever notice how an eletrical socket looks like a face? Same thing.)
I think I've only ever used emojis sarcastically.
That makes sense.
😕
That makes sense.
😕