Digital Discourse Database

Number of Posts: 10
Posts 1 - 10

For this company, online surveillance leads to profit in Washington’s suburbs

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Newspaper | Washington Post
Date | 10.9.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | emojis, privacy, social media, threat
Summary | Babel Street is a startup that uses online surveillance; they try to get private information from online platforms in order to catch cybercriminals. For instance, police departments might use the service provided by the company in their investigations and scan posts online. Experts try to track dangerous criminals while analyzing posts in more than 200 languages, including the emoji language. Emoji has actually been a challenge for analysts. Another challenge the company faces is to make sure sure it doesn't violate people's privacy.
Image Description | Photograph of a man standing in a news room in front of several TVs, and two other people.
Image Tags | female(s), male(s)

Test your millennial knowledge with this mindless, fun game

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Newspaper | Washington Post
Date | 6.8.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | emojis, game
Summary | In the new app/game called "guess the emoji", users need to guess the meaning of emojis. Although the game is mindless and perhaps stupid, it is still fun.
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Techie teens help bridge generational digital gap

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Newspaper | Washington Post
Date | 16.5.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | email, emojis, smartphone, social media, youth
Summary | Teenagers are volunteering to teach elders about technology. They teach them simple things like how to use email, social media, how to connect to wifi, as well as how to use emojis. The elderly taking the courses love it because the kids do not use complicated language to explain the technology because they have learned it all intuitively as digital natives.
Image Description | Teenagers and elderly people using a laptop.
Image Tags | computer/laptop, female(s), male(s)

President @realdonaldtrump

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Newspaper | Washington Post
Date | 3.5.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | emojis, hashtags, politics, smartphone, Twitter
Summary | During his first 100 days, Trump tweeted a lot. His most used word in Twitter was "Great" (then: very, today, fake, news). His most common hashtag was "MAGA", the topic he most tweeted about was the media, and his favorite interjection is "Enojy!". Trump does not use a lot of emojis in his tweets, but his most common emoji is the American flag. Also, his most common hour for tweeting is 8am, and he mostly uses his iPhone.
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Techie teens help bridge generational digital gap

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Newspaper | Washington Post
Date | 16.5.2017
Language | English
Country | Switzerland
Topic Tags | digitized education, emojis, gender, texting, youth
Summary | A grandmother texted her grandson a series of emojis to ask him how the pets were and how the hockey game was. Most of the seniors are not as tech-savvy as she is. As a result, three high school teenage girls decided to create a new organization called GTG Tech in order to help older people get more familiar with new media. They hold free training lessons once a month. Most of the seniors seeking help are women. The girls and older people think that the intergenerational exchange is very rich.
Image Description | N/A

Also Opening

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Newspaper | Washington Post
Date | 28.7.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | emojis
Summary | The Emoji movie stars T.J. Miller as a 'meh' emoji named Gene. Unike other emojis, Gene is capable of expressing other feelings, which is why he has been excluded from the community.
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Taking poetic license with AI personalities

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Newspaper | Washington Post
Date | 7.4.2016
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | artificial intelligence, emojis, gender, research/study
Summary | Artificial intelligence assistants are now being creatively enganced by educated and professional writers and poets so as to make their conversation appear more human-like (f.i. by using emojis) and their personalities more authentic. Polls have shown that users prefer female voices for AI assistants and most companies have acted accordingly. Microsoft has however pre-empted reinforcing stereotypes about female assistants by limiting the number of apologies and self-deprecating comments for their AI assistant Cortana.
Image Description | Image of a meeting of professional writers working in AI at Microsoft.
Image Tags | computer/laptop, female(s), male(s)

Facebook's 'reactions': What's to not like?

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Newspaper | Washington Post
Date | 25.2.2016
Language | English
Country | Switzerland
Topic Tags | emojis, Facebook
Summary | Facebook has just released its new reaction buttons, and not everyone is happy about them. When is appropriate to use each "reaction"? The article describes each of the six reaction buttons and their supposed use.
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YOLO flight: Why are dictionaries inhaling so much Internet slang?

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Newspaper | Washington Post
Date | 13.12.2016
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | emojis, language threat
Summary | Dictionaries, in trying to keep up with the rapidly changing language in this era of social media, keep adding more and more words spread online such as "fleek" or "yaaas". They do make sure not to add every meme whose use spikes for a moment but they make an effort to stay on top of adding relevant new words which are widespread and keep being used frequently. Many people are worried about this development and see in this the dacay of language as we know it, especially since the Oxford Dictionary word of 2015 is not even a traditional word but the laughing-tears emoji.
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It or not, emoji evolving as language to be taken seriously

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Newspaper | Washington Post
Date | 28.2.2016
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | emojis, law, misunderstanding, threat
Summary | Emojis as legal evidence crop up in court rooms more and more since people communicate much more on various social media. Two cases are known of students being questioned in court because they had posted something negative about school on social media accompanied with gun, bomb, or explosion emojis. Defendants text messages have been presented to the jury as evidence with the emojis because they can signal sarcasm or a joke. A general discussion has opened up about whether emojis should be regarded as evidence in court and if yes, how? Emojis do not have a set meaning, they are very context-dependent.
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