When my team migrated to Slack, in addition to all the back-end work, we had to re-create nearly 100 of our custom emojis.
Could we have settled for similar images or gone without? Sure, but where’s the fun in that? Besides, this was our lingua franca and in daily use. No support person could get by without a classic facepalm. And what modern company could possibly communicate effectively without Party Parrots?
Our emojis are a key part of our team culture, with mutually agreed-upon understanding of their meaning and inside jokes behind them. Families and friends groups have their own dialects in this way, too.
Emoji use is spreading in digital communications. These days they even show up in corporate newsletters and, as the Verge reports, apparently they’ve been causing consternation in legal circles for 15 years.
Court cases have hinged on commas (regular or my beloved Oxford), and while it’s still rare for the presence or interpretation of emojis/emoticons to be legally important, it has happened.
It may still seem absurd to consider that someone could be convicted of a serious crime like attempted murder based on “threatening” emojis, but that would probably change after the first high-profile conviction. Text messaging has recently come up in our own government’s shenanigans, after all.
Having become more familiar with anti-human trafficking efforts in the region, reading in the Verge article about the relevance of emojis in trafficking cases is fascinating. Beyond the horrific nature of the crimes, from a communication standpoint it’s really just another version of the centuries-old practice of using code to hide criminal activities or intent.
Particularly in so vast and varied a world as our online landscape, how do you prove a definitive use and meaning of a symbol? One decision at a time, I guess.
It will take some time to build up enough case law to establish a generally accepted set of definitions for at least some emojis, like the crown, high-heeled shoe and bag of money referenced in the sex trafficking case. And even that will likely be somewhat limited by geography, professions, local language, etc.
The rental agreement example in the Verge article particularly illustrates how nebulous and difficult “emoji law” potentially is. A couple in Israel seemed to agree to rent an apartment, as demonstrated by a series of emojis: [champagne bottle][squirrel][comet]. Except then they ghosted and rented somewhere else. They ended up losing when taken to court by the jilted landlord. (Okay, champagne bottle I get, but they lost me with the squirrel…)
Communities already abandon their slang once it’s gone mainstream, and there’s no surer way to get kids to stop using words than to have them mortifyingly picked up by their parents. So would sketchy folks not abandon certain emojis for newer, more secret ones once they knew they were potentially incriminating?
What about the general evolution of language over time, or the addition or loss of colloquial meanings that may vastly change someone’s intent? We basically need an OED for emojis.
Shakespeare’s audiences knew exactly what “Get thee to a nunnery” meant, but my high school English teacher had to explain that it had nothing to do with religion. [crown][high heel][bag of money] could come to represent something completely separate from sexual exploitation, or nothing at all.
I have no idea how long it takes the law – or society in general – to catch up to such changes. And what happens if people don’t even see the same thing to begin with? Not whether or not you think that sometimes an eggplant is just an eggplant, but if you literally don’t see the same thing as what I sent.
Thanks to all the different platforms we use, iPhone emojis can be quite different from Android emojis, Facebook emojis, etc. And that’s not even getting into custom emoji packs. The odds of us all becoming united under One True Platform are slim to none.
Of course, people are remarkably good at pattern recognition and filling in communication gaps, which could help. Corporate types may very well know what the random capital letter at the end of this sentence represents. J
For the uninitiated: Microsoft products convert : and ) commonly used to make a smiley face into an actual smiley face icon. This icon is also what you get in the Wingdings font if you type a capital letter J.
However, when an email arrives in my non-Microsoft-using inbox, I end up with a weird trailing J because my system doesn’t know what it’s supposed to be.
This kind of garbling is hardly rare. It’s also super common for those who try to use international characters online (accented ones or non-Latin alphabet).
Which raises another interesting question regarding our systems and basic technical issues with recording, tracking or analyzing our use of language. Like, sure, you can get an emoji domain for your website, but there are tonnes of caveats. And that’s just one use case.
Can systems and databases that store court documents or other official records retain emojis correctly? Could I search for all the civil cases in the past five years where there was a point of contention regarding the emoji content of text messages? Would 70-year-old judges even recognize relevance and ensure correct recording of emojis in cases that come before them?
What about when someone tries to give their child an emoji name? You know someone’s going to try. People with single letter surnames or numbers in their middle names already live bureaucratic nightmares, and those are still from the Latin alphabet.
Apparently at least one company exists that has more or less registered an emoji name. No word on what that might have done to their admins’ and marketing folks’ sanity...
What about the layers of complexity we could add to passwords? Upper- and lower-case letters, numbers, symbols, and emojis? Except that browsers already diverge on how Punycode is interpreted.
We tend to assume that pictures represent simplified communication compared to spoken language or modern text. We had pictograms, which we then stylized and further simplified into cuneiform and such, and the rest is history.
But consider all the questions I’ve just asked, which barely scratch the surface of the possibilities and potential issues with the widespread use of emojis in modern communications.
Kinda makes you wonder what ancient peoples really had going on, or how basic future humans might think we were, a few thousand years hence.
