The Register: Why tell the doctor where it hurts, when you could use emoji instead?. “Doctors could soon use emoji, those love-them-or-hate-them colourful successors to the humble emoticon, to communicate with patients and ease their diagnosis and recovery – or, if you prefer, 👨⚕️🗣️🖼️🤒🚑🏥🩺🤕.” I use a text editor to write ResearchBuzz. Apologies if anything got mangled in the excerpt.
The Daring Librarian: Do You Know About Secret Bitmoji’s?. “Did you know about Secret Bitmoji’s? Well, I just stumbled over them this summer and WOW! Cool! Are these new features or something we just missed? Since Bitmoji never talks to me — and I’ve Tweeted and Instagrammed them over and over for years and nothing……I guess this is a new feature?”
BBC: The little-known human stories behind emoji designs. “Peter Tosh’s story doesn’t end happily; he was murdered in a horrific attack in the 1980s, but he left both a musical and a political legacy. And if you open your emoji keyboard and search for ‘levitating’, you will find a tiny picture of a man dressed in a dapper black suit, hat and shades. That is Peter Tosh.”
Slate: The Most Cursed Emojis of All. “As someone who has used an iPhone for all of her adult life (after several lucky teenage years with an LG Chocolate in robin’s egg blue), there are certain things about Android phones that are simply mysteries to me. For instance, I only recently learned that the Android plays home to one of the most cursed phone features of all time: the Google Emoji Kitchen, a function on the Google’s Android keyboard.”
Women Love Tech: Simone Biles Is The First Olympian With A Personal Emoji! . “The Olympics never disappoints when it comes to keeping us on the end of our seat. But this time, we’re not talking about what’s happening on the track, but off it. Simone Biles has made history by becoming the first Olympian to be given her own emoji.”
MakeUseOf: How to Use Facebook’s New Soundmojis on Messenger. “There are different ways of expressing yourself on Facebook Messenger. You can call, via audio or video, sent plain text messages, audio messages, or even use emojis, GIFs, and stickers to convey a message. In addition to that, you can also now use Soundmojis—emojis with sound—which makes chatting even better. This article will explain what Soundmojis are, how Soundmojis work, and how to use them in Facebook Messenger.”
BBC: Face palm: When the emoji you want doesn’t exist. “Do you have a favourite emoji? Maybe it’s the wink or the face rolling around with tears of laughter. Perhaps if you’re feeling slightly more sardonic, it’s the smiling face with jazz hands. With more than 3,000 to choose from, there are plenty of options. But what happens when the one emoji you want isn’t there?”
CNN: Microsoft is bringing back Clippy. “Saturday, Microsoft (MSFT) is announcing plans to replace its standard paperclip emoji with an image of big-eyed, happy helper Clippy. The move is part of a broader refresh of 1,800 emojis across all Microsoft apps and services, which will roll out later this year.”
Emojipedia: New Emojis in 2021-2022 . “A saluting face, biting lip, coral and a low battery are among the emojis up for approval later in the year. These are currently draft candidates for the next emoji release versioned Emoji 14.0. Other inclusions on the draft list are consistent gender options for pregnancy and royalty, ‘heart hands’, and the ability to choose from 15 different handshake combinations.”
Bloomberg: Social Media Fails to Curb Racist Emojis Aimed at Soccer Stars. “A wave of online racism aimed at some of England’s Black soccer players has highlighted how social media companies’ content moderation systems are failing to monitor the use of emojis.”
Washington Post: Why Palestinians are uniting around watermelon emoji. “Raising the red, green, white and black Palestinian flag is banned in Israel. So the watermelon — locally grown and similarly colored — has for decades served in Palestinian iconography as a subversive stand-in. In recent weeks, the watermelon has resurged on social media, as part of what some Palestinians say are efforts to preempt or circumvent online censorship and content moderation, in the face of heightened enforcement sparked by the Israel-Hamas conflict in May and the attendant wave of grass-roots Palestinian activism.”
EurekAlert: Significant otter helps couples communicate from the heart. “[Fannie] Liu was part of a team from CMU, Snap and the University of Washington that built Significant Otter, an app designed primarily for smart watches that allows couples to communicate with each other based on their sensed heart rate. The team presented their work this month at the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Computer-Human Interaction (CHI) Conference.”
The Vintage News: The Project That Could Turn Ancient Mayan Hieroglyphs into Emojis. “Writing on their website last year, Unicode announced a National Endowment for the Humanities grant enabling the Maya Hieroglyph Project. Its goal is to make historical communications ‘accessible to both expert and non-expert user communities through creating an annotated digital archive.’ Dr. Gabrielle Vail is in charge of the team, which focuses on the Classic period of 250–900 CE.”
CNN: Sorry, millennials. The 😂 emoji isn’t cool anymore. “In recent weeks, two internet-savvy generations have been clashing in videos and comments on TikTok over the hallmarks of millennial culture that are now deemed uncool by Gen Z. The list includes skinny jeans (Gen Z verdict: set them on fire), side parts (Gen Z verdict: middle part or bust) and perhaps most painful of all, the popular laughing crying emoji that some millennials, myself included, use hundreds of times a day, or more.”
AP: Cooper Hewitt acquires two emoji that symbolize inclusion. “The Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum has acquired two emoji that have helped broaden diversity for users of the tiny pictures, becoming the third museum to add emoji to their digital collections.”
