The original Unicode emoji made sense as a compatibility measure with Japanese encodings, but I thoroughly disagree with the expansion of Unicode Emoji.
The idea that the default emoji represent white people is ridiculous, since the codepoints are meant to translate directly with Japanese computer systems. In the original NTT DoCoMo set, they didn't even have facial skin (probably because of device resolution and colour limitations), just features like eyes and mouths. Maybe the Unicode consortium made a mistake by specifying them as bright yellow, which people now associate strongly with the Simpsons, where white people are represented as bright saturated yellow.
In my understanding, nobody in the standardization process even considered that Emoji had a race. If people project one race or another onto what are supposed to be disembodied universal facial expressions, then that's their problem.
I feel you should have more empathy for people that do not look like you.
For some people, race, fighting for for recognition, let alone equality, is a daily battle. You may live and work far from this conflict, but it exists, and in some part the diversity modifiers for emoji provide folks with empowerment. Don't take that away over limitations in the spec.
There are billions now who own smart phones, and want that funny Japanese Telco encoding standard to reflect their world too.
This is not a technical or standards problem, and the fitzpatrick modifiers do not decrease functionality of unicode.
I feel my point is to chill, and consider how functionality outside your perceived value might bring others joy.
> Maybe the Unicode consortium made a mistake by specifying them as bright yellow
I don't think Unicode consortium initially specified any color for these characters. For instance U+1F604 is defined as "SMILING FACE WITH OPEN MOUTH AND SMILING EYES". I remember an early Android phone displaying these expressions on green robot faces. As far as I know color specifications only came later with the skin tone modifiers.
Maybe the Unicode consortium made a mistake by specifying them as bright yellow, which people now associate strongly with the Simpsons, where white people are represented as bright saturated yellow.
Those who aren't as familiar with the Simpsons would probably associate yellow with Asian --- which sort of makes sense due to them originally being Japanese.
Coloured emoji don't make much sense to me either --- they are text like any other, and should thus be represented with the same colour as the text.
My understanding of the Emoji acceptance process is that such characters only get accepted if you can prove that people have been using the emoji as a text-like glyph in other contexts (usually either on paper, or in a proprietary forum/chat system.)
Unicode’s aim isn’t to serve as a useful “palette” of characters that people should actually want to type ever. It’s to serve as a single, unified encoding for archiving existing texts. If people persistently write the same odd symbol on paper, then Unicode aims to ensure that they’ll have a common codepoint to encode that symbol to.
The worst case scenario for Unicode is a world where people encode texts onto forums with millions of little proprietary Emoji images, and then those sites close, the images are lost, the URLs of the images are just UUID.png or somesuch, and so the contextual meaning of the text is lost.
The second-worst-case is one where such texts blanket the internet, and—because of their various derivative-proprietary encodings—it becomes impossible to make such texts machine-readable/indexable/sentiment-analyzable/etc.
The Unicode Standards Body might be behaving rather silly from the perspective of someone who just wants to be able to record their own thoughts—but from the perspective of ensure the Internet and all its documents remain amenable to library science, the standards body is behaving perfectly sensibly. They’ll give people whatever they need to keep using Unicode in place of some proprietary extension, because that’s how you keep text on computers interchangeable.
The original Emoji sort of made sense - there were a number of disparate systems already using the private use area. Now that we're inventing brand new ones that are going to literally live forever the unicode community should seriously consider hoisting them out and forcing carriers and other communication utilities to create proper standards for inline images.
Is it intentionally ironic or unintentionally confusing that the first instances that should be ":-)" have actually been converted into the emoji versions?
I definitely agree that the over-specialization of emoji faces is ridiculous.
However, one question has occurred to me: what has the actual consequence of the skin-tone-modifier been on real-world emoji use?
The answer, in my experience, is that essentially no one uses skin-tone-modified emoji at all. This, in turn, makes me wonder if perhaps this was the intended result the whole time—to, in a very circuitous way, ensure that the "default" state of any given emoji has a generic skin tone.
I don't think white people use white emoji because being white isn't part of their self-identity. That's one of the normalizing qualities of being the dominant type (e.g. Hollywood). Just like nobody points out that they are heterosexual.
I live in Mexico and my darker skinner friends use the color tinted emojis.
My experience has been that people who are black, Hispanic, Pacific Islander, and some Asian ethnicities use them pretty much constantly. My Japanese, Chinese, and Taiwanese friends generally just use the yellow ones, whereas my Indian in-laws use skin-tone-modified ones. Maybe you're just not interacting much with non-white folks in a context where emojis are used frequently?
The overwhelming majority of my non white friends use emojis with skin tone modifiers.
This emoji business is sticky. On one hand, I agree that the current way is not sustainable - we can’t keep adding dozens of weird concepts like POO WITH CONCERNED FACE every year.
I welcome adding Emoji to Unicode. I also welcome adding different skin tones to Unicode. I welcome everything that invites more people to engage with, appreciate, and feel included by technology.
I welcome a world where you don't need to be at all tech-savvy to get as much out of a computer as anyone else. People can drive without being engine-savvy, and I think it is fan-fucking-fastic that computing is moving in the same way.
Technology is such an amplifier for human activity, if everyone doesn't get to play, we're doing it wrong.
Any time anyone writes "this new thing that makes a system less elegant but opens it up to more people is a bad new thing" -- they are doing it wrong.
Do you not realize the downside of having some shady syndicate controlled by rich and powerful people dictate which symbols people are allowed to use to communicate with each other electronically? Or do you realize it and you think it's great, because you expect them to act in your interests, and against those of people you hate?
easy early fix would have been to make all skin tone emojis blue. okay now they represent everyone and no one, no need to introduce ten skin color gradients for each meme
[+] [-] microcolonel|8 years ago|reply
The idea that the default emoji represent white people is ridiculous, since the codepoints are meant to translate directly with Japanese computer systems. In the original NTT DoCoMo set, they didn't even have facial skin (probably because of device resolution and colour limitations), just features like eyes and mouths. Maybe the Unicode consortium made a mistake by specifying them as bright yellow, which people now associate strongly with the Simpsons, where white people are represented as bright saturated yellow.
In my understanding, nobody in the standardization process even considered that Emoji had a race. If people project one race or another onto what are supposed to be disembodied universal facial expressions, then that's their problem.
[+] [-] encryptThrow32|8 years ago|reply
For some people, race, fighting for for recognition, let alone equality, is a daily battle. You may live and work far from this conflict, but it exists, and in some part the diversity modifiers for emoji provide folks with empowerment. Don't take that away over limitations in the spec.
There are billions now who own smart phones, and want that funny Japanese Telco encoding standard to reflect their world too.
This is not a technical or standards problem, and the fitzpatrick modifiers do not decrease functionality of unicode.
I feel my point is to chill, and consider how functionality outside your perceived value might bring others joy.
[+] [-] avian|8 years ago|reply
I don't think Unicode consortium initially specified any color for these characters. For instance U+1F604 is defined as "SMILING FACE WITH OPEN MOUTH AND SMILING EYES". I remember an early Android phone displaying these expressions on green robot faces. As far as I know color specifications only came later with the skin tone modifiers.
[+] [-] userbinator|8 years ago|reply
Those who aren't as familiar with the Simpsons would probably associate yellow with Asian --- which sort of makes sense due to them originally being Japanese.
Coloured emoji don't make much sense to me either --- they are text like any other, and should thus be represented with the same colour as the text.
[+] [-] parenthephobia|8 years ago|reply
They didn't. It's recommended, but not required, to use a "non-realistic" colour, examples being yellow, blue, or gray.
http://unicode.org/reports/tr51/index.html#Diversity
[+] [-] derefr|8 years ago|reply
Unicode’s aim isn’t to serve as a useful “palette” of characters that people should actually want to type ever. It’s to serve as a single, unified encoding for archiving existing texts. If people persistently write the same odd symbol on paper, then Unicode aims to ensure that they’ll have a common codepoint to encode that symbol to.
The worst case scenario for Unicode is a world where people encode texts onto forums with millions of little proprietary Emoji images, and then those sites close, the images are lost, the URLs of the images are just UUID.png or somesuch, and so the contextual meaning of the text is lost.
The second-worst-case is one where such texts blanket the internet, and—because of their various derivative-proprietary encodings—it becomes impossible to make such texts machine-readable/indexable/sentiment-analyzable/etc.
The Unicode Standards Body might be behaving rather silly from the perspective of someone who just wants to be able to record their own thoughts—but from the perspective of ensure the Internet and all its documents remain amenable to library science, the standards body is behaving perfectly sensibly. They’ll give people whatever they need to keep using Unicode in place of some proprietary extension, because that’s how you keep text on computers interchangeable.
[+] [-] mmastrac|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SCdF|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ac29|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] username223|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anotherevan|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bearbearbear|8 years ago|reply
Isn't :-) sufficient and more efficient in terms of data transfer?
[+] [-] gweinberg|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FreakyT|8 years ago|reply
However, one question has occurred to me: what has the actual consequence of the skin-tone-modifier been on real-world emoji use?
The answer, in my experience, is that essentially no one uses skin-tone-modified emoji at all. This, in turn, makes me wonder if perhaps this was the intended result the whole time—to, in a very circuitous way, ensure that the "default" state of any given emoji has a generic skin tone.
[+] [-] always_good|8 years ago|reply
The blog post gave some good examples.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/05/white-p...
http://www.businessinsider.com/kendall-jenner-used-darker-em...
I don't think white people use white emoji because being white isn't part of their self-identity. That's one of the normalizing qualities of being the dominant type (e.g. Hollywood). Just like nobody points out that they are heterosexual.
I live in Mexico and my darker skinner friends use the color tinted emojis.
[+] [-] trowawee|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] achilleas|8 years ago|reply
And how do these consequences lead to Unicode being over/dead as the post title suggests?
[+] [-] GuiA|8 years ago|reply
This emoji business is sticky. On one hand, I agree that the current way is not sustainable - we can’t keep adding dozens of weird concepts like POO WITH CONCERNED FACE every year.
On the other hand, if you have a system whose goal is to represent humans, but certain humans feel that it can’t represent them (eg http://www.cnn.com/2017/07/18/europe/hijab-emoji-teenager/in...), then you have a problem.
[+] [-] porfirium|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Frondo|8 years ago|reply
I welcome a world where you don't need to be at all tech-savvy to get as much out of a computer as anyone else. People can drive without being engine-savvy, and I think it is fan-fucking-fastic that computing is moving in the same way.
Technology is such an amplifier for human activity, if everyone doesn't get to play, we're doing it wrong.
Any time anyone writes "this new thing that makes a system less elegant but opens it up to more people is a bad new thing" -- they are doing it wrong.
[+] [-] pjmlp|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Oxitendwe|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maxerickson|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stesch|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gkya|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PythonicAlpha|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stesch|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BLanen|8 years ago|reply
Unicode has like a billion more spaces for characters.
[+] [-] junkscience2017|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maxerickson|8 years ago|reply
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/blue-skinned-people-kentucky-re...
[+] [-] gweinberg|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] porfirium|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] interestingcpp|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] bearbearbear|8 years ago|reply
Isn't yellow sufficiently neutral?
[+] [-] mikeash|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Oxitendwe|8 years ago|reply