Digital Discourse Database

Number of Posts: 30
Posts 11 - 20

Apple Welcomes New Faces To Its Growing Emoji List

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Newspaper | The New York Times
Date | 18.7.2017
Language | English
Country | U.S.
Topic Tags | diversity, emojis
Summary | Apple shared a preview of a set of its 12 new emojis. Some of the new emojis are a woman wearing a hijab, a breastfeeding woman, a face throwing up, a zombie, and a sandwich. Apple's goal has been to be more diverse and inclusive, which is why we'll be able to use a hijab or breastfeeding emoji. There are several requirements to meet in order to see a new emoji on our keyboard: compatibility with emojis in other social media platforms and expected level of use.
Image Description | N/A

Le gardien du temple des émojis

(The guardian of the emoji temple)

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Newspaper | Le Temps
Date | 21.6.2017
Language | French
Country | Switzerland
Topic Tags | censorship, diversity, emojis
Summary | Mark Davis (President of the Unicode Consortium), who lives in Zurich, talks about emojis. Anyone can submit new emoji proposals; but the proposal needs to be convincing. The Consortium has been trying to be more progressive, which is why people can now use same-sex couple emojis, or a hijab emoji. The Consortium does not accept any brand emojis nor famous people emojis (although people would like to see Jesus and Justin Bieber). Keith Winstein claims that nobody should have the right to tell other people which images they can or cannot use.
Image Description | Photograph of Mark Davis
Image Tags | male(s)

Brauchen wir ein Emoji mit nicht-binärer Geschlechtsidentität?

(Do we need an emoji with a non-binary gender identity?)

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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)

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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.

Auf diese 69 Emojis können sich Smartphone-Nutzer freuen

(Smartphone users can look forward to these 69 emojis)

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Newspaper | Welt
Date | 23.3.2017
Language | German
Country | Germany
Topic Tags | diversity, emojis
Summary | The next OS update is near and it will include 69 new emojis approved by the Unicode Consortium. Among them are a tyrannosaurus rex, a zombie, a puking emoji, and many others. All emojis are now available in male and female versions.
Image Description | The new emojis.
Image Tags | emojis

Maschinen sind nicht die besseren Menschen

(Machines are the better people)

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Newspaper | Sonntagszeitung
Date | 14.5.2017
Language | German
Country | Switzerland
Topic Tags | artificial intelligence, diversity, gender, translation
Summary | One could think that artificial intelligence robots are not racist or sexist but because they learn from information circulating on the internet, they are subject to the biases as most poeple. This is why a beauty contest judged by an AI robot favored white people as more beautiful. Online job listings can also be biased based on gender so that women will not see higher-paying job listings or gender inclusive language gets lost in translation.
Image Description | N/A

Viele neue Emojis

(Many new emojis)

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Newspaper | Appenzeller Zeitung
Date | 27.6.2017
Language | German
Country | Switzerland
Topic Tags | diversity, emojis
Summary | Unicode Consortium are releasing a new set with new emojis. Among them are the female hijab emoji, various food emojis, a vomiting emoji, fantastical creatures like zombies and vampires, and many others.
Image Description | N/A

Lacht er noch oder weint er schon?

(Is he still laughing or is he crying already?)

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Newspaper | Appenzeller Zeitung
Date | 5.4.2017
Language | German
Country | Switzerland
Topic Tags | diversity, emojis, misunderstanding
Summary | Emojis are centrally organized in the Unicode Consortium based in Silicon Valley, CA. They decide which emojis are made available on all devices. They usually accept emojis that are globally significant, like for example the new hijab emoji. Even though they try to make their emoijis more diverse, they still get criticized for giving all male emojis short hair and all female emojis long hair. Many Japanese people say that Westerners misunderstand many of the emotive emojis and misuse them.
Image Description | Emojis.
Image Tags | emojis

Es flitzt der Rollstuhl

(The bolting wheelchair )

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Newspaper | Tages-Anzeiger
Date | 16.1.2017
Language | German
Country | Switzerland
Topic Tags | (mental) health, diversity, emojis
Summary | A German organization for the inclusion of people with disabilities into public life is offering a set of Inklumojis: emojis that depict people with disabilities. These include a man in a wheelchair with fire shooting out of the back suggesting speed, athletes with leg prosthetics, a romantic couple holding hands, one of them with a prosthetic arm, and many more. Emojis can normalize people with disabilities much easier than big advertising campaigns which is why they will attempt to have their emojis included by the Unicode Consortium.
Image Description | Emojis of people with diabilities.
Image Tags | emojis, female(s), male(s)

Redhead emoji finally on the table after campaign for ginger equality

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Newspaper | Telegraph
Date | 20.1.2017
Language | English
Country | UK
Topic Tags | diversity, emojis
Summary | The readhead emoji will be released soon. People had been complaining about the lack of ginger emojis. There will be two possibilities: a single readhead emoji, or custom-hair option to choose "red hair". The campaign to introduced a ginger emoji was launched in Scotland.
Image Description | N/A

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