Fed2 Star - the newsletter for the space trading game Federation 2

The weekly newsletter for Fed2
by ibgames

EARTHDATE: June 19, 2016

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REAL LIFE NEWS: CONFUSING EMOJI

by Hazed

These days people don’t want to communicate using words, they prefer emoji – those colourful icons that supposedly represent a mood, an action or a thing.

At the risk of sounding like a grumpy old fart, I hate them. Apart from the obvious smiley and frowny, I can never figure out what they are supposed to represent! Clearly I am not fluent in the language of emoji.

But I am not alone, because studies show that even when two people are looking at the same emoji, they can disagree about its meaning. What’s more, it turns out that different phones show the emoji pictures differently – and in some cases the difference is enough to completely change the tone of the communication.

For example, on the Nexus an emoji that looks like a broad, toothy grin shows up on an iPhone as a kind of grimace that looks more angry than happy.

It’s all because different manufacturers use different fonts so just as the size and shape of the letter A can vary, so can the way an emoji is depicted. So much for emoji being a universal language.

So I’ll just stick to words – with the occasional J thrown in!

Source: http://nymag.com/following/2016/04/people-often-disagree-about-what-emoji-mean.html
http://grouplens.org/blog/investigating-the-potential-for-miscommunication-using-emoji/

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