Group items tagged

The OMG Shakespeare series replaces prose with text speak and emoticons. Furious academics have branded the new books 'absolutely disastrous.' Regarded as some of the finest works in English literature, now some of William Shakespeare's greatest plays--Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth and A Midsummer Night's Dream--have been translated into emojis.

Michael Everson, a linguist living in Ireland, is responsible for helping the literary history of the human species survive in the digital age. He is also responsible for helping you give somebody the finger through your iPhone.

Michael Everson, a linguist living in Ireland, is responsible for helping the literary history of the human species survive in the digital age. He is also responsible for helping you give somebody the finger through your iPhone.

Emojis, the smileys in Japanese electronic messages and web pages, earned their way into digital culture royalty just a few years back, when various developers created apps for mobile users to download that allowed them the option to add little picture messages into text conversations. When Apple introduced iOS 6, it allowed iPhone users to directly integrate emojis into their keyboard through the OS settings. Now, they're everywhere in pop culture.

For teenagers these days, social media is real life, with its own arcane rules and etiquette. Writer Mary H. K. Choi embedded with five high schoolers to chronicle their digital experiences. (This article is an example of qualitative research: data is triangulated and comes from various sources (self-report, actual online behaviors, digital posts).

The increasing use of emojis is causing a drop in English slang and is slowing become a new language.

Barack Obama says his address to Congress this year is all about 'finding areas where we agree, so we can deliver for the American people'. And if there's one thing we can all agree upon, it's emojis.

It turns out texting through emojis may be in fact improving rather than decaying the english language.

The emoji search engine. A fast emoji search experience with options to browse every emoji by name, category, or platform.

Katy Perry's #1 hit, rendered (mostly) in emoji.

SwiftKey, a keyboard app, did an analysis of one billion emoji from aggregate SwiftKey Cloud data. The interactive map shows which emoji are most frequently used by which state. The full report can be loaded from https://blog.swiftkey.com/the-united-states-of-emoji-which-state-does-your-emoji-use-most-resemble/.

This article is also linked to a video in which Bill Nye the science guy explains dreams to kids using emoji. This article and video demonstrates that children are beginning to use and understand emoji at a younger and younger age.

And the 2015 word of the year: the emoji for "tears of joy." Whereas traditional alphabet scripts struggle to keep pace with 21st century rapid communication, emoji, in contrast, "are becoming an increasingly rich form of communication, one which transcends linguistic borders...They can serve as insightful windows through which to view our cultural preoccupations."

Award-winning, Chinese contemporary artist, Xu Bing, has created _Book From the Ground_, a text that speakers of any language can "read." His interest in pictorial storytelling was heightened by a bubblegum wrapper he happened upon-a series of three images connected by two arrows that instructed the chewer to put the gum back into the wrapper after chewing and throw it in the trash. This became Xu's inspiration for _Book from the Ground_. Xu's book reflects cultural literacy and modern tools and technologies, rather than traditional literacy. The author predicts that the younger generation is likely to find his icon language easier to "read" because they've been exposed to these images for as long as they can remember on the Internet. "I think it can be seen two ways," says Robert Harrist, a professor of Chinese art history at Columbia University who has taught a semester-length course on Xu's work. "It's great that everybody can communicate now and stay in touch constantly through one medium or another, a kind of shared, plugged-in visual world." But at the same time, with the "flattening and evening out in communication so much is lost," especially when it comes to tense or nuance. "The real surprising thing here and the challenge and the thing I love about it is he makes you ask yourself: What is writing?" adds Harrist, who describes Xu as "the greatest living Chinese artist, simple as that.... Everything he does is profoundly thoughtful."

How the Emoji is affecting our daily communication. Could Emoji be considered as a new language?

There are around 340 million L1 English speakers, and 600 million ESL speakers, making the language accessible to an estimated billion people, English is also the primary or official language in 101 countries. However, Vyvyan Evans, British linguist, notes emoji are an even more intuitively accessible global communication mode. 3.2 billion people have regular Internet access in the world, and 92 percent-plus of those 3.2 billion people regularly send emojis. So from that perspective, Emoji leaves English in the dust, in terms of use and uptake. Most people think that when we communicate in default face-to-face mode, language is what's driving effective communication, and in fact it's not. Communication requires different channels of information - language is just one. The two other important ones are paralanguage, and that's how you're delivering the words, so tone of voice, and the really big one is kinesics, and that has to do with action-based, nonverbal communication. Emoji functions analogously to tone of voice and to body language in text-speak, and without it, we're reduced communicators.

This article talks about emojis and why they are not good to use when texting someone. An edition of the newspaper USA Today last week chose to supplement all its front-page stories with Facebook's new "emoji reactions"*. Of course, the internet's response was largely one of horrified bemusement (currently we lack an emoji for "horrified bemusement" so, apologies readers, you're going to have to do the hard work yourselves by reading the words the old-fashioned way).

Ever wonder what

This article explains how emojis are used globally because they can be understood by anyone regardless of what language they speak. Everyone knows what emojis mean because the things they express are universal. This article also says that emojis can be used to add clarity and nuance to text messages, not just emotion. However, emojis cannot currently be considered a language because they don't have grammar and can't be combined to mean something more complex, although this might happen someday, as novels such as Alice in Wonderland have been translated into emojis.

As emoji have become more specific in both their appearance and their meaning, their ideographic flexibility has eroded. Emoji are transforming into a large catalog of fixed portraits, rather than a smaller set of flexible ideograms.