User:Ssstephen/Reading/Modifying the Universal
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Our bodies are a big part of the way we communicate.
Gretchen McCulloch, Because Internet, Chapter 5 about Emoji and Other Internet Gestures.
Writing is a technology that removes the body from the language.
Also McCulloch. She goes on to talk about emoji as gesture and more specifically as emblems or emblematic gestures (emblems are gestures which can stand on their own without speech and convey verbal meaning). Non-verbal communication based on traditional gesture language: this reminds me of dance, music, etc. Are emoji a performance art?
If we think of these emoji as emblems, we know that the range for variation is tiny indeed.
Mmmm this is becoming more about the McCulloch chapter than Roel's piece. I'll switch back soon.
In an article called “We Need to Talk About Digital Blackface in Reaction GIFs,” Lauren Michele Jackson pointed out that black people are overrepresented in gifs used by nonblack people, especially those that show extreme emotion. She linked this stereotype to the exaggerated acting of minstrel shows and scholar Sianne Ngai’s term “animatedness” to describe the long-standing tendency to see black people’s actions as hyperbolic.
Also "co-speech" or illustrative gesture, emoji examples such as the emoji you would put after the words "happy birthday", it doesnt matter if its cake or celebration or dancing or champagne, it doesnt matter what order, and they are to illustrate the speech more than essentially having meaning on their own. These are the emoji you browse for instead of knowing exactly what is required in advance.
Emoji have the same rhythmic tendency as beat gestures.
In speaking about bad character encoding:
But the names for this problem in other languages speak to the frustration: Japanese mojibake, “character transformation” (that’s the same moji as in emoji); Russian krakozyabry, “garbage characters”; German Zeichensalat, “character salad”; and Bulgarian majmunica, “monkey’s (alphabet).”
The aim of Unicode is to standardise and universalise, this is why the Unicode standard is always added to and never removed from. But is this how language works is it changing and evolving, or accumulating?
you can’t involuntarily give off an emoji. They’re all given out deliberately—you choose exactly which one to send, and you know that everyone else does, too. Emoji and all of their relatives are fake by definition.
We take the expression of mental states so much for granted in informal speech, that oldest and first-learned form of language, that it takes the dramatic expansion of a new genre, informal writing, to make us pay attention to it again.
Ok ok back to Roel.
the politics of anti-racism and anti-sexism are being emptied out of their sense and meaning for the sake of a commodified version of equality
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the problem of universality begins with the assumption that anything can and should be encoded in symbolic logic
To what extent can these ideas be torn down from within, like Kurt Gödel tried to do? To stick with the maths, just as a metaphor, Gödel proved that consistency implies incompleteness. Does this mean that to be more complete we need to be more inconsistent? Which is more important, seeing as you do have to make a choice? Being incomplete means excluding, which being inconsistent maybe means accepting mistakes, paradoxes, contradictions and other fun things like that.
the [Unicode] standard is non-binding and the actualisation of its universality depends on the willingness of soft- and hardware manufacturers to implement the recommendations of the Consortium.
But these soft- and hardware manufacturers are in practice the members of the Unicode Consortium, so.
By carelessly merging the two lightest skin tones, Type 1 and 2, into one single modifier, the Consortium underlined that light skin functions outside this colonial gaze.
😬
Why are the Simpsons yellow? - Peter, 9, Cambridge
They're yellow because when it was time to pick the colour for the cartoon I didn't want the conventional cartoon colours. An animator came up with the Simpsons' yellow and as soon as she showed it to me I said: 'This is the answer!' because when you're flicking through channels with your remote control, and a flash of yellow goes by, you'll know you're watching The Simpsons.
From a 2007 question from a nine year old asked of Matt Groening on CBBC Newsround.
The users’ demand for the diversification of emoji points to the way in which on-line representations might operate on the actual through the virtual, and opens up possibilities of representation that are not available in the physical world.
Sometimes this kind of argument feels like there is a delineation between "actual" and "virtual" identity, is there a place where given identity stops and chosen identity begins IRL and online? Is this place imposed culturally, is it the same or different for different people? This is implying on-line identity gives more agency to people over their identity, which I think is true in a lot of situations but a quite specific lens to view something very complex. In the spirit of being inconsistent I think this could be an appropriate place for contradictory narratives.
The characters in Unicode that are tagged “emoji” are in fact a hybrid collection of images, each with their own visual language and culture of use.
In the context of the gesture things above, the same gesture can mean different things (or be meaningless) in different cultural contexts.
Down the slippery slope, emoji have become a pre-coded form of identification.
Isn't this true of all communication in some sense? I use a vocabulary that positions me as a university student, furthermore I can switch to professional shitetalk to locate myself otherwise. There are layers of language which are used to communicate identity.
A widely published research article into the cross-platform use of emoji claimed that different renderings of the characters could lead to misunderstandings.
Completeness and consistency again, should we maybe instead accept the misunderstandings? Maybe also relates to Gretchen's idea that emoji are fake (chosen, constructed) by definition. There is a message being sent, and that means there is a possibility for it to be interpreted differently to how the sender imagined.
Should these complex questions be in the hands of the Unicode Consortium, specialised in finding technical solutions for implementing “all the living languages possible”?
Maybe? Is it making the Unicode Consortium acknowledge that language is more complex than a series of symbols? That their task is not simply to collect and classify all the icons and signs like some sort of linguistic Linnaeus. That these symbols are important to people and how they are categorised has an effect on them? And that technical solutions cant exist in isolation from cultural and human context?
We felt that the combination of the representational turn and market pressure produced unavoidable and unsolvable problems that the Unicode Consortium tried to respond to through the warped logic of the modifier mechanism.
Yes saying the problem is unsolvable is genuinely really useful. Stop trying to solve all the problems.
The event also represents a typical case of do-ocracy, in which a (nominally) open and discursive process of negotiation is sidelined by presenting faits-accomplis. Do-ocracy is a mode of decision-making popular in technical circles for its speed and decisiveness. Having done the task also becomes the justification and validation for it... Do-ocracy assumes that everyone is able to “act” with the same power and when you want to oppose a decision, you just “do” something else.
Yah bad. Hard to avoid at smaller scales as well.
Technical decisions are sometimes taken without thorough reflection on their implications, whether historical or scientific, let alone on their social consequences.
Something I think we're all aware of, but yes this is a really good example.
Yet the Unicode Consortium operates as much more than just an IT standardisation of existing languages. Through the encoding of emoji, it creates and normalises a set of representations of humanity.
And outside of emoji, this is happening in any standardisation of language / characters.
Unicode could provide such a platform if it took its own potential more seriously and opened up the process of technology making and standard-forming to the larger public.