| I bet your opinion is reinforced even though your comment becomes more and more grey. That's the feeling I get when I read the responses: someone saying that they don't have to have a precise meaning, some one says that it's something you insert when you have nothing to say, someone else is surprised to find out that some emoji doesn't mean what they thought it means according to the official description. You wonder: what kind of communication is that? You are 99% correct, it's not communication. Whedon had this great line that "when people stop talking, they start communicating", and he wasn't talking about body language. He was talking about the babbling, the noise in the communication. Emoji is indeed just more noise. I think People disapprove you because, just like there are useful idiots, I guess there's also useful noise. But that's still idiots and noise. If you say something and someone doesn't understand, then you clarify what you said. This is a conversation. This is communication. Those who believe that a smiley can magically convey more than words, describe more accurately your mood etc. believe in the illusion of communication. :-) is good as an abbreviation of "you made me smile", but that's about it. Furthermore, standardizing it pointless. Emoticons are the product of a community. Their meaning is defined within a community and their use marks the fact that you belong to that community. Twitch for instance sells the right to use custom Emoji-like things in their chat channels. One of them is the face of a former Twitch dev named "Kappa" that is being used for some reason as a mark of irony. On IRC, I've seen channels strongly disapproving even the use of the old :-D and prefer "haha" instead. Perhaps they were upset with people coming up with a new variant every week, like 8-| or :-3 that didn't have any meaning except for those who "invented" them just for the sake of invention. Communities have their own set of codes, for instance there's TT or QQ for "crying", ^^ for smiling, etc. People will for ever invent new ways of expressing themselves with letters and symbols, just like every generation invents its own slang. Whoever came up with this idea of an Emoji standard didn't understand what they saw. |
I was glad to see that somebody understood the point I was trying to make, and expanded upon it.