At least in Korea, people don't really use inline emoji characters much - but they use stickers (larger, often animated cartoon images of characters in a variety of emotional stances or life situations, some with associated personalities or relationships with each other) a whole ton. They serve a variety of purposes, e.g. responding with a summary of what the other person said to signal understanding/empathy/compassion, teasing, flirting ... there's a lot of joy in maintaining and using a sticker collection actually, picking the right sticker for an occasion is a unique form of eloquence to collectively revel in. It's a big celebration of reading a room, wit and quick thinking, just using images. It's some of the most joyful creative writing around, I think. People also wind up adopting certain characters as "theirs" in a group chat, so it adds to identity.
This article seems to completely miss the reason these were created as emoji - they were encoded for use on the Japanese mobile web so that phones wouldn't have to keep downloading images for "this train has free seats","loading this site is free of data charges" and "apply for this event" etc. They weren't meant for private use but for commercial use.
Someone who is white and living in Eastern Europe I find comments like these deeply offensive:<p>> overwhelmingly male, overwhelming white and overwhelmingly engineers<p>This is me, but why does every article picture me as someone who has power and decision maker. Do I have to feel bad that I am male, white and engineer? I have seen hunger, REAL povery, communism, I make less than your McDonalds worker in U.S now and my standard of living is low compared to developed world. Why do I have to always read something is wrong with me?
It's a bit odd (and sad) that the "Where is the Dumpling Emoji" project — or the corresponding section of TFA — makes no reference whatsoever to the previous Unicode Power Symbol project[0] which was also a grassroot effort to get "missing" emoji into the standard (in that case the IEC Power Symbols ⏻ ⏼ ⏽ and ⏾ with the "Power Off" symbol reusing the pre-existing ⭘ "HEAVY CIRCLE" codepoint), although it was obviously more reduced in scope and lifespan.<p>[0] <a href="http://unicodepowersymbol.com" rel="nofollow">http://unicodepowersymbol.com</a>
It would be really cool to have anglicized transliterations of these, as a standardized expression notation, with tool-tip call-outs.<p>The reason I say this, is because I have no idea what "🈯️" is, if it appears within a body of text, in isolation.<p>Something like:<p><pre><code> !:symbolic-character-name:
</code></pre>
or:<p><pre><code> [symbol]character-name[/symbol]
</code></pre>
Think about the boundaries in communication something like that might smash. (...or inadvertently create, I hope not!)
Having dabbled with the ARIB subtitling and data submission formats a bit myself, I can't help but think, who thought that it'd be a good idea to embed those symbols to the <i>character encoding</i>? Surely there's a room for a higher-level structured language that has tags, escape codes or some other markup, and allows for extensibility and ease of use. Keep the concerns separate!