Number of Posts: 6
Posts 1 - 6
Tech’s sexism doesn’t stay in Silicon Valley. It’s in the products you use.
Newspaper | Washington Post
Date | 8.8.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | (mental) health, artificial intelligence, diversity, gender, research/study
Summary | Slicon Valley has been entangled in scandals around sexism and racism recently. Many innovations incorporate artificial intelligence which means that the software learns from data reflecting our social reality but which are biased. This leads to issues like image recognition not recognizing black people as humans but as gorillas because the data the program learned from included predominantly white people. A similar case is a health app that tracked various physical paramenters but not the menstrual cycle thereby disregarding a large proportion of the female population.
Image Description | N/A
Brauchen wir ein Emoji mit nicht-binärer Geschlechtsidentität?
(Do we need an emoji with a non-binary gender identity?)
Newspaper | Welt
Date | 14.5.2017
Language | German
Country | Germany
Topic Tags | diversity, emojis, gender, research/study
Summary | A new package of emojis will be released soon. One of them represents a person who is neither entirely male nor female, i.e. of non-binary gender identity. It is questionable whether it is worthwhile to represent such a small minority, seeing that there is no redhead emoji either because only 2% of the global population are redheads. A linguist of the research project "What's Up, Germany?" however argues that having a gender inclusive emoji is sending a powerful sign and can affect society via language in the long-term.
Image Description | A Getty image of a woman vomiting a rainbow, a tweet about the gender inclusive emoji, and a few GIFs of celebrities.
Image Tags | emojis, female(s), gifs, male(s)
Punkt: Am Ende
(Period: the end)
Newspaper | Die Zeit
Date | 31.3.2017
Language | German
Country | Germany
Topic Tags | diversity, emojis, language threat, punctuation, research/study, texting
Summary | The neutral punctuation mark "." is disappearing from our written language. The most likely reason is that with text messages we no longer need a period to tell us when a sentence is finished. Linguists are not worried about the extinction of the period. Language is ever-changing, they say. It is quite sad though, that the period is being omitted more and more and hardly anyone cares. All debates now center around emojis: can Apple just replace the gun emoji with a water pistol one? Is it racist to use a black emoji as a White person?
Image Description | The sunset over the ocean.
Emoji diversity: how 'silly little faces' can make a big difference
Newspaper | The Guardian
Date | 7.11.2016
Language | English
Country | UK
Topic Tags | diversity, emojis, research/study
Summary | San Francisco hosted the first Emojicon conference, where people could participate in different sessions (e.g Emoji karaoke, translation of songs into emojis, emoji spellcasting, etc.). Emojis are everywhere and users feel attached to them. They were even considered as art (they joined the MoMa in New York). However, the rise of emoji has led to cultural problems; people want emojis to represent the world's diversity. A researcher wanted to find out why the first emojis were not diverse. She said that the first emojis actually aligned with the belief that technology is neutral.
Image Description | Photograph of two smartphone with emojis on their screen, photograph of the emojibator next to an emoji pillow, image of the original set of 176 emojis, and set of emoji faces in different skin colors
Image Tags | emojis
Gaymoji: A New Language for That Search
Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 14.3.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | diversity, emojis, research/study, sexting
Summary | The dating app Grindr caters to gay men and is now adding specific emojis - called Gaymojis - to their app. They have noticed that 20% of the messages sent on their platform contain emojis so they are providing emojis specific to the gay dating experience such as a peach with a phone (= bootycall) or an eggplant with a ruler (= well endowed). One linguist says that emojis may take some pressure off of the content of the conversation. Instead of thinking of something to say, emojis just signal that 'I am here and I am interested'.
Image Description | Portrait of the Grindr owners, the Grindr office in LA, and some Gaymojis.
Image Tags | emojis, male(s)
Get Ready, Here Comes Generation Z
Newspaper | Huffington Post
Date | 11.4.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | brain, diversity, research/study, youth
Summary | The next generation consisting of people born between 1996-2012 is being researched so that college mentors know how to interact with them. This "Generation Z" has a short attention span of ca. 8 seconds, is very competent at multi-tasking, position themselves as global citizens interconnected with various people digitally, and have entrepreneurial ambitions with a strong preference for financial security over pursuing a passion.
Image Description | N/A
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