Where Are Telephone Keycap Emojis?

December 20, 2018 by Colin Berkshire

I have never used the new, modern artwork emojis. Somehow, they seem to lack the cleverness of the original ASCII emojis. And, there are so many of them that I hardly know the difference between  and . I mean, how am I supposed to infer meaning between these? I watch people spend a minute choosing exactly the right emoji, oblivious to the fact that the nuances between one and the other will be lost of the recipient.

I suppose part of the reason I object to emojis is that I have Aspergers, and so it is already hard enough to nuance emotions without adding the layers of white-noise that most emojis add.

My biggest objection is that they are robbing Unicode values. There is a very finite number of Unicode values that can be used for symbols, and we’re squandering them on things like poop . Do we really need a poop  emoji?

As somebody responsible for HR I must be sensitive to all people and must be professional in how I deal with people. Before we could express racism using emojis I felt somewhat safe sending the rare, occasional smiley  to indicate a deed well done. But now that emoji can be modified to use different skin tone (based on the Fitzpatrick Scale) Worse, I can express age and gender, so I must choose between 🏻 and 🏾 and 🏿 and 🏼. You see, this has made use of any emoji a politically incorrect disaster followed by a lawsuit just waiting to happen.

Am I obligated to choose skin tone? Do I pick mine or the recipient’s? Is it proper to ask the recipient their skin-tone so that I can be sensitive and send my emojis in the correct tone?

And, then there is the fact that most emojis are non-asians. I’m hard pressed to find an emoji of a Chinese, or a Japanese. As one who works extensively with Asians I am quite aware of the traditional differences between Japanese and Northern-Chinese and Southeastern Chinese. Emojis do a remarkably poor job of representing these people…probably because of a terrible racial bias of those who are designing and standardizing emojis.

But let me be more pragmatic: Unicode characters were intended to be able to encode the symbols of language. Mathematical and hieroglyphic symbols. And, even before that they were to provide a way of encoding pictographic language characters such as used in Thai and Chinese.

We’re gobbling up terabytes of disk space with poop emojis  while still failing to have the symbols we really need to communicate clearly.

The emojis I need are touch-tone buttons. Where are they? Why don’t we have the standard, universal, touch-tone buttons with letters “ABC” on the 2 button? Why doesn’t this keycap exist?

I need these keycaps all the time. And, we don’t have them.

We have this emoji, , for whatever unknown reason. But no touch-tone keycaps.

We even have a telephone emoji with the wrong number of buttons on it: ️.

So,  on emojis.

We need telephone keycaps. Anybody with me? 😉