Yeah, I have always interpretted that particular emoji as wincing in pain, like, "ouch, how incredibly awkward" as if the person were grimacing, or cringing at someone else embarassing themselves.
That's what the face looks like. Abivalent schadenfreude, halfway to laughing at the expense of others.
At best, it reads like laughing at someone who accepts a painful dare, like eating an incredibly spicy pepper and then laughing as they choke and cough and cry from the spice and heat.
It doesn't matter because the vast, vast, vast majority of people lack any sort of technical nuance to negotiate such mild differences in a rush.
As pedantic as the viewer's interpretation may be, the author in any sort of emoji context, is moving fast, to snipe the conversation, just to get a word in, edgewise.
And with soft keyboards, touch typing is non-existent, and adjacent, similar smiley faces get used way, way, way more loosely than abbreviated initialisms (omg r u srs 2???) or typos (your and awesome person) so, to mince emojis as highly specific in meaning is silly.
Half of all emoji usage is drunk dials. The other half is precision cyber bullying and organized crime. Only the margin of error is left to be considered as conveyed in earnest by the sober minded, prudent and cautious fellow citizens we share the road with.
My grandma can't tell the difference. My mom can't tell the difference. My dad doesn't care. My kindergartener just likes them all. 90% of the world isn't equipped to parse mojis in strict mode, but that doesn't mean their emoji use won't be strictly consumed and observed after the fact.
> And with soft keyboards, touch typing is non-existent
I have to disagree here. Touch typing in the sense of feeling the keys is of course impossible but it is quite common to type on the phone without looking at the keyboard and without mistakes.
> Half of all emoji usage is drunk dials. The other half is precision cyber bullying and organized crime. Only the margin of error is left to be considered as conveyed in earnest by the sober minded, prudent and cautious fellow citizens we share the road with.
I curate my Twitter follows quite heavily and the few people I have there use emojis quite a lot and with obvious deliberation. I know it's popular to hate on emoji but looking down on all people using them is not useful.
I use emojis in instant messaging with my wife. We use these two emojis sometimes, as a single message to express a state of mind, they have very specific meaning and are not confused.
In addition to regular conversation we have a shared vocabulary of maybe a dozen emojis to express things that can't be put into words easily or is more effective as a single character. Over time we also developed alternate meaning for some of them.
I was an emoji/emoticon skeptic for a long time but I came to realize they can encode a lot of information.
Why? Because a) it looks bad (one of the worst made emojis out there), and b) when someone sends it to me, I have no clue what they mean. While it's technically "crying with joy", it also resembles crying with despair - and with regular people, who don't even know what "emoji" is or that they have names, I can't be 100% sure which interpretation they picked.
Cultural or psychological differences in interpreting facial expressions. It's clearly not despair to me. The mouth is upturned, which indicates smiling.
But to someone who can't easily differentiate upturned from downturned, it might be despair.
In blown-up version like this it's easier to see the upturn. In smaller renderings, like in Facebook & Google products on my desktop and on the phone (or pixelated copy-pastes of it on top of Facebook videos), the rendering sits squarely in the uncanny valley for me. It looks like smiling, but then it looks also like the face is in great pain, with all the muscles contracted, squeezing tears out of its tear ducts.
I suppose the guy who I'm responding to is expecting you to be familiar enough with the full selection of emoji to know that it's definitely the tears of joy emoji and that there isn't a nearly identical one for despair.
It'd be a poor design decision if there were. But it's also unreasonable to expect everyone to think like a good interaction designer.
"The political purpose of Newspeak is to eliminate ambiguity and nuance (shades of meaning) from the language, and so reduce the language to simple concepts—pleasure and pain, happiness and sadness ..."
It's weird how the meaning of an emoji can change so dramatically depending on which font you're using. The biggest example is the moon face emoji. On Twitter or Android, it's just a cute little moon. On Apple, it suddenly becomes molester moon.
That's what the face looks like. Abivalent schadenfreude, halfway to laughing at the expense of others.
At best, it reads like laughing at someone who accepts a painful dare, like eating an incredibly spicy pepper and then laughing as they choke and cough and cry from the spice and heat.