Soon after the Wired World Editorial Manager began in 2023, he sent me a message. Randomly, I had a heart. A message from my very serious and very new boss. To this day it hurts me.
I have no memory of what the message said, I just have a long and heart shame. When I noticed my error a few hours after the surgery, I was frightened. Will I delete it? Take a joke? Leave my job? Finally, I replaced it with a one -time work and prayed that he would record exactly none of these.
My wrong reason is that it has become a reaction about Slack, which shows the top three Emoji when floating in one opinion. That means hearing my boss’s message was part of a bigger problem: I always heard the messages of colleagues. The more I looked at, the more I realized that this was happening everywhere. Of course, Slack, but also in one-to-one texts, group chats-where I can respond with one.
It was not just me. A literal war reporter at the front line in Ukraine showed my signal message that says I would return to him about a land. The chat of the main group of friends in heart messages is of all kinds. Of course, my wife and I constantly heartbroken each other’s texts, until the failure to do so has become a subtle point that one of us is very crowded or crankshaft. The heart emoji has clearly becomes a default way of communicating with each other. The question is what is communication? Its meaning seems to change with the text until it has no constant meaning – except when using it wrong.
Neil Cohen, a cognitive scientist who focuses on the visual communication and assistant professor of the University of Tilburg in the Netherlands, tells Wired in an email that understanding the context – and therefore, in the sense of – a heart emoji is essential before using it.
“Otherwise if you send the wrong person to the wrong heart instead of the white heart!” Cohen says. “This has become a serious issue, given that petitions have even considered whether sending emoji to colleagues is sexual harassment.”
Yikes
The heart has been widely used as a symbol of hundreds of years and has changed over time. “A prominent theory is that silfium seeds were formed from ancient Africa such as heart and used as a bureaucracy,” Cohen says. “So he was accompanied by sex, and only later through Christians, he was accompanied by love.”
These Christians took the idea of the sacred heart, and the Hazaras became savage and popularized the heart as a symbol of admiration in Western culture, so that now more than what is the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, he has aroused Halmarack and shy chocolates.
The hearts were among the first Unicod symbols created in the early 1990s, which later become emoji today, according to Emojipdia. Released as part of Unicode 1.1 in 1993, his former name first shared the “Heavy Black Heart”. By 2014, it was mentioned as the most popular “word” in the world. Now this is a default emoji where you can type – and this is where the problems come in.
