Had an interesting chat today with a friend. She summarized a few concepts in 2 emojis. That got me thinking about efficiency of language and entropy of the transmission of ideas.
Emojis reside mostly in the realm of mobile. Normal keyboards do not have the function to insert any emojis at all.
Emojis is not an option on keyboards. (You have to muck around and dig out the special characters)
There are 8 categories within emojis comprising of 845 emoji characters (Unicode 6.1) iOS 9.1 onwards supports 1620 emojis (sadly, for those not running the latest Apple OS will see the difference as an alien)
Interestingly enough, each Tech company has their own rendition of the same Unicode emoji:
This is probably why when you are using Google Hangouts and sending a tweet the same :) will turn out to look different. (Everyone wants their own standards. Argh!)
Essentially emotions can be covered with Smileys. There is a category for activities. And there’s food and drinks. So a really cool example I found while on Tinder was an amazing profile of putting emojis to good use (The girl is pretty but for the sake of her privacy her details are masked):
It is amazing to be able to condense everything about yourself into 21 characters (ok I’m ignoring the categories and numbers). Just think of the time saved. Emojis would be easier to analyze from a data perspective. Essentially these are key word searches without the language and contextual nuances of natural language
There is an even more amazing language that allows ideas to be transmitted in a vocabulary of 120 words. Toki Pona. My gripe with it is that it is still alphabet based. The beauty of characters is that at one glance it can transmit multiple Concepts, however sometimes interpretation could be misconstrued.
I think the concept of emojis is underrated and apart from sending fun messages, the application of emojis to reduce entropy in communication should be further explored.
