UnNews:New emojis cleared to help trolls and oldsters
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| New emojis cleared to help trolls and oldsters | 
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20 August 2015
WIKIA CITY, California -- Older social media users and internet trolls are in for a treat next year, as 38 new emojis, including an emoji with a gun to its head, barfing and flipping the bird, have been approved as candidates for a 2016 update to Unicode.
The Unicode Consortium, the organization that sets the industry standard for representation of text, has accepted the updates for Unicode 9, which is due for release next year, to cover the range of emotions that are currently missing from social media.
The concept of emoji came about to assist those who are unable to express their emotional disposition by writing. Many cases of misinterpretation have occurred, where the reader takes a positive view of a comment that was intended to make them feel ashamed, angry or distressed.
To resolve this issue, a smiley face, originally made of a colon and close bracket, was added to the end of the text to show the reader that the writer is content about the content they are contesting. As this abuse of punctuation became more popular, it reached a stage where, without an ASCII smiley face closing every sentence posted, it was automatically assumed a comment was meant to be positive. Eventually, the graphic smiley face was added to the code, because the grammar police were pushing hard to pass a bill through Parliament making abuse of punctuation a criminal offence with a minimum five-year jail term.
Since, on social media, everyone reads everyone else’s posts, users now have to put a smiley face on everything to prevent offense or shunning. High-volume users regard putting an emoji at the end of a post as important as remembering your girlfirend’s birthday.
Mature social media users are woefully ill-equipped to use emojis, as many middle-aged adults feel they are sufficiently eloquent to make their disdain for the topic clear by using snide English and without having to resort to a picture. However, habitual social media users have become incapable of detecting emotion without an emoji. Given a comment such as: “Why do you keep cluttering up my “News Feed” with your boring dinners and your boring selfies?” — they always assume it is a joke and respond with “LOL” and a smiley face. “Unfriending” the individual in despair could result in deep offence, tears, and isolation from the family, because a Facebook friend is the same as a real friend, sibling, or other close family member, except for the small matter of inheritance.
The new emojis tackle this issue. Placing the new emoji with a gun to its head at the end of the above post would leave no doubt that the comment is not a joke, and the reader seriously needs to get a life, especially if they still respond with LOL and smiley face… which they inevitably will :)
Sources[edit]
- Doug Bolton "New emojis: Unicode consortium considers 38 new emoji designs for introduction in 2016". Independent, August 19, 2015