Published 2025-11-10
tag(s): #yell-at-cloud #smallweb #link-post
Via Joel's weekly recap I found this
Brain Baking post : "Thumbs Up
👍".
As I kept reading, I couldn't help but feel the vibe was very much...
...and I guess that readers can imagine the tone on the rest of this post, based on the fact that the starting point is a meme. And I guess another clue is that I regularly use emoji in my writing... 🤓
Clear and effective human communication is one of the hardest things to get right. The widespread adoption of emojis only made the problem worse.
n
And the starting point is that I agree with this. Very much. Look, I am not here to say emojis
can't be problematic. Or that they aren't (ab)used.
I used to despise the use of even a single emoji, but now I have come around to find them
"funny".[1]
Do I use them in communication, say, at work? If it's in a chat window, you bet.
But I won't write a Confluence document using them, and I am pretty sure all of
the README files for my open source projects are emoji-free, since I tend to
treat them like documentation. To me, emojis are an informal thing, so they don't belong in
those places.
So far, so good. But then...
This gets worse in cross-cultural communication according to Cominsky. It’s not just a cross-cultural problem, it’s also a generational problem: a study by Zahra and Ahmed revealed that emojis such as thumbs up, crying laughing and skull are more likely to cause mix-ups between generations. Or how about surrounding the emoji with textual context in order to reduce potential confusion? That was disproven by Miller et al. in Understanding Emoji Ambiguity in Context: The Role of Text in Emoji-Related Miscommunication [...]
And here is where the author started losing me. "This gets worse in cross-cultural
communication"...just as using "plain English".
In fact, the first read I made of the article, I assumed this was written by an anglocentric
American[2], because of the underlying tone of "emojis are ambiguous, words
are always clear".
I don't think anyone can look at the history of words, spoken or written, and make such a
statement with a straight face.
Same goes for the fact that communication is hard when it happens across cultures or
generations. I can see it all the time with my wife and my son.
On the former case, I am (well, was) way more embedded in online culture and "meme of the
week" stuff than my wife. And she is more in touch with the argentinian cultural zeitgeist
than I am. Quite often one of us is helping the other make sense of a joke, headline, or
comment from a friend.
In my son's case, he displays his own lingo nowadays. He and his friends have inside jokes,
and there are generational things that I don't understand[4]. Sometimes I
have to ask him to explain something just so I "get" what he means. And to be honest, many
times I only do so at a surface level...
A lot of times lately I've been thinking of my own poor parents, given that I was (was?
>_>) chronically online in my teens. I bet there were times when they had no clue what I
was saying or meaning with a particular phrase.
AND GUESS WHAT! Now I get to experience that myself!
I don't say anything new by stating that time is a circle, or that some experiences never
change through history, or that a lot of parenting is looking back and having renewed
understanding for your parents. So I won't elaborate on any of these.
Emphasis below is mine:
The last piece of research I’d like to share here is that of Shandilya et al. on using non-contextual communication in virtual workspaces like Slack and Google Chat. It looks like new employees first have to read between the lines and learn the intricate interpretation details of the micro-culture, sometimes even differing from team to team within the same company. Before we can send out a thumbs up, we first have to decode how others around us are using and interpreting it. Which might differ greatly from your habitually usage in causal app messages to friends.
I argue that getting acquainted with your team's "micro-culture" is crucial, regardless of
emoji use or not. Heck, acronyms alone can make life very difficult, last week at work there
was mass confusion over one during a group presentation.
Why single out emoji as the only cause of ambiguity?
And that's how I arrive to the conclusion of "old man yells at cloud". The author has a
particular dislike of emoji, and he is well in his right to have it. But it is never voiced as
a preference, using instead linked research as if it were an objective matter.
It is not. 🥰
I think that gender-neutral Spanish is an abomination. My only "real" argument, is that there are a lot of constructs that make things contradictory and confusing. Only one I remember now is a joke about how the gender neutral of "hombro" (shoulder) would be "hombre" (man).
And what do I do with my dislike of gender neutral Spanish? I use it ironically, of
course.
I secretly hope that it goes away, and that we all think of it as an excess of political
correctness. But I also know that it is completely out of my control.
The language will keep evolving, and it is up to me decide to keep up with it, like I did in
the 90s when it incorporated hundreds of acronyms and English borrowed words.
Or I can complain like the old man I am. Regardless of which one I choose, the language will
do its own thing.
And that is the bottom line. Things change, languages and communication etiquette evolve outside of anyone's control. They changed a lot when we moved from postal mail to emails and chat rooms, and again with T9 typing and now with emojis.
We can hate the change, or embrace it, but it is hard to pretend it is more than a preference,
no matter how many studies we cite.
I will still follow to the blog, BTW, because even if I didn't agree with the post's
conclusion, it was well written and a breeze to read.
And there
are
other great
posts, and that's just looking at recent history.
But I will note, when checking Brain Baking's About page (to see if he was American - he is
not) I noticed he is using Latin words to define himself.
Obscuring meaning through an ancient language, rather than emojis or acronyms. 😉