One other thing this makes me think of: how is this all going to affect future historians looking back at our textual artifacts?
With paper, we see the original forms and, if our typography has changes, we can adjust or re-write it to make it more understandable – we know what all the ſ’s mean in Paradiſe Loſt. Further, there was no emotional meaning to those symbols that changed as the symbol’s shape changed. Milton read Paradiſe Loſt out loud the same way we read Paradise Lost, the shape isn’t relevant.
But if we save only the ASCII code of the emoji, will we know what the emoji looked like to the person who sent it? If you query Twitter’s archives for the earliest tweets with emojis, they will be rendered however your browser wants to render them now. And as the renders change – all the new “race” and “sex” modifiers, and whatnot – you will see something different from what the original author wrote.
It’s not enough to think that we’ll just have a record of this: it may be impossible to find LG’s 2011 version of a slightly-grimacing smiley-face in a hundred years, let alone that that was even the medium the author was using when they wrote their work.
We’re placing a lot of meaning in individual characters that have no standardized representations or associations, and no guarantee that the same characters will even continue to look the same in the coming decades. And when the look of the character is the entire point — in contrast to ſ and s — that’s a big problem.
How many nuances and double-entendres are we missing when reading 17th century literature? How many more would we be missing if there weren’t innumerable hordes of scholars spending their entire careers mining the likes of Milton?
OTOH, how do we know there aren’t subtle distinctions in hieroglyphs that we have no way of discerning? We wouldn’t be able to read them at all if someone hadn’t found the Rosetta Stone. But maybe because papyrus and pyramid interiors were so expensive compared to today’s paper and free blogging platforms, they didn’t write down a lot of navel-gazing think-pieces about how future historians might interpret the differences between Khakheperresenb’s and Ptahhotep Tshefi’s depictions of flamingoes, and the different attitudes towards brightly colored wading birds they reveal. Or even within an individual scribe’s corpus, maybe he intended to convey something with a slight tilt of the bird’s head, or whether it’s standing on one leg or two.
Point is, if future historians have access to our emoji, they’ll likely also have access to this very article.
This. Get you Unicode right, {Apple, Frauenfelder}. although the cultural context thing might make this impossible. I don’t envy the good people on the Unicode Consortium a bit.
although the cultural context thing might make this impossible. I don’t envy the good people on the Unicode Consortium a bit.