“In 1999, the Japanese wireless communications company NTT Docomo released 176 pictures for people to quickly, efficiently, and emotively communicate on the tiny screens of their phones,” Mark Wilson writes for Fast Company. “Twenty years later, and we now have over 3,000 emoji and counting. On the one hand, emoji are getting more inclusive. They finally feature same sex parents, female scientists, and people in every skin tone other than Simpsons yellow. On the other, as these icons become more inclusive, each becomes less universal.”
“Jennifer Daniel, designer at Google, thinks about this deep irony at the heart of visual language all the time. She traces it back to the age-old problem with the male bathroom symbol,” Wilson writes. “‘That person could be man, woman, anyone,’ she says. ‘But they had to add a little detail, that dress, and suddenly that person symbol doesn’t mean person anymore; it means man. And that culture means a man-centered culture.'”
“While Daniel can’t fix our bathroom signage, as the director of Android emojis, she can fix another problem: The lack of gender-neutral symbols in texting. She can give us the zombies, merpeople, children, weightlifters that are neither male nor female,” Wilson writes. “‘We’re not calling this the non-binary character, the third gender, or an asexual emoji – and not gender neutral. Gender neutral is what you call pants,’ says Daniel. ‘But you can create something that feels more inclusive.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take:
Quick, bar the windows of Cook’s Apple Park office! Pipeline has got to be despondent that he didn’t come up with this masterstroke of SJW virtue-signaling first!
… homophobic nut jobs.
LMFAO this is what we come to MDN for – US politics, though I must admit, the Apple v Google Virtue Signalling Race 2019 is F’n hilarious
I would have thought that electronics and gender fluids don’t mix.
Does one include mental illness?
EXACTLY…..don’t say it too loud though, the SJW police could be hiding around the corner!
Including the GOP elephant would be too US-specific.
This is what communicating in our society has come to. Forget language, like talking. Just send a ridiculous emoji. No wonder everybody is killing themselves and others now. We might as well all be batteries powering the Matrix.
Don’t make light of mass shootings. Anyway, they have been going on a lot longer than we have had emojis.
http://timelines.latimes.com/deadliest-shooting-rampages/
Social networks worst thing to ever happen to the world.
It’s just secular hieroglyphics where Egyptian were religious.
Jane Dangler is a gender-fluid emoji
Society is doomed. These youngs kids can’t even tell what sex they are. It’s kinda easy, just look in your pants.
sex and gender are two different things.
You old white people will all be dead soon though, so keep complaining.
You young color-fluid people will soon be color-privileged and finding yourselves hated by the next generation, just as you hate your elders. Watch out! You reap what you sow.
We will first, however, have the honour and privilege of watching the worst of your generation pass on.
And thank goodness that for nearly everyone, that’s all it comes down to. However, we need to be compassionate towards people who don’t feel they belong in the body they were born into.
And in the previous article no one’s buying smart phones five year low. Now we know why all anybody cares about including Apple is emoji’s. Friggin waste
Pandering to the mental till.
Yes, this MDN headline is definitely pandering to the mentally ill who have all decided to post and show how fixated they are on other people’s life choices that don’t affect them personally in any way.
What ever you say, you poor confused snowflake….
What a waste of time….