We are living in strange and different and, yes, unprecedented times.
(Were they trying to say, "Yes, you're still talking, but we're not really listening?" I suppose you'd have to ask them.) After Donnelly tweeted yesterday about Ireland's progress on the vaccine front, thousands of people simply replied with a single thumbs-up emoji. In fact – look, people are bored – a meme appears to have been born. When the exchange was reported over the weekend, in the Sunday Independent, Donnelly's wayward emoji use didn't go unnoticed. Whatever his inner thoughts or motives, news of the exchange is doing nothing to dispel the niggling sense some have that Donnelly's personal brand runs towards the smug and the snarky. If you are going to let an emoji – any emoji – do the grunt work for you in a conversation, you'd really better know what you're getting yourself into
Big thumbs up professional#
Did Donnelly really mean to give the CMO the brush-off? Is he a simply a busy man for whom brevity is key? Did he realise in the moment that this was an inappropriate response to a professional correspondence? Or is he just hopelessly out of touch with the nebulous contexts of each emoji? Let’s pause this scene for a moment, and step outside it, Matrix-style. When Holohan reiterated the seriousness of the situation some days later, texting Donnelly that the “R” number in Dublin had increased (not exactly good news), Donnelly replied with a single thumbs-up emoji. (Donnelly had said on radio that transmission was slowing in Dublin and that the outlook appeared “positive”).
These companies that sit on Unicode, that have shareholders and images they need to protect, are in essence constraining what the world's 3.2 billion internet users are able to use emoji to express.On October 12th the Chief Medical Officer, Dr Tony Holohan, texted Donnelly to say that the number of Covid-19 cases in Dublin was on the rise and to advise him to be cautious in public messages about the virus in the capital.
Big thumbs up update#
What Apple did in its update last year was to change the representation of the gun, which previously was a revolver, to a water pistol, a harmless child's toy. In a case in France last year, a man in his 20s was sentenced to three months in (jail) for sending a gun emoji directed at his ex-girlfriend. I'm not saying that's where we are, (but) just to give you an example, there have been a spate of court cases the last 18 months or so, where people have been arrested for issuing threats of various kinds (in the form of) sending gun emojis. This goes back to (Unicode) rules and regulations and, arguably, the political correctness of Unicode, the gatekeeper, which is a force for good, but also in the overzealous interpretation of what is correct and what is good, this can potentially lead to an Orwellian nightmare. How do you represent iconoclastic? Or memory?Ī: Emoji is potentially on a slippery slope to censorship. How do you represent feminism using an emoji? You can't. These organizations have a number of rules and regulations that govern emoji, and one is that for something to be accepted as a new emoji, it must be iconic in nature, it must be pictographic, so what that means is the thing that does the representing of the idea must look like the idea it's representing.Ī: The problem is that emoji cannot represent more abstract ideas, because it's limited up front in terms of what the symbols look like or can be. And there are 3 non-North American organizations. The (members include) eight of the North American giants: Adobe, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, IBM, Oracle and Yahoo. It's controlled by Unicode, which is a California-based consortium that was founded in 1988, and this particular organization (provides an international standard for) fonts and scripts, so this is noble and important. A: Probably the most significant weakness comes from how it's controlled.
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