聊聊那些点亮银森的emoji表情们

20160513ou 一中两外锵锵三人行 今日话题： 为职业妇女推出新的emoji表情 Brian: What do you do when you find yourself unable to express your..something in words? You use an emoji, of course, especially if you’re a young, digitally-active type. They’ve been around for a while, but their degree of inclusiveness has prompted some questions. Now, in response to such concerns, Google will be adding more professional emojis of women. So what exactly is the deal here? Nick: Well, yes, we’re talking here about the little pictures that you can send in digital messages via your messaging apps, in text messages, on your phones. People have started to notice that when it comes to the activities that people are doing in these emojis, there is a bit of a difference in terms of the gender split between the emojis. So there are not many – or, in fact we can’t seem to think of any at all – of women doing things other than traditional feminine activities like dancing or painting their fingernails, and people have started to complain about this. Yoyo: When it comes to emojis you can always see that there are emojis with women being brides or princesses, getting a haircut, or even going dancing with a red dress – in high heels! Brian: In high heels, of course! Because clearly, this is a symbol of femininity. Yoyo: And then you can see some men emojis, they are doing a lot of activities: going boating, surfing, and some of them wearing suits, they are being so professional! Some of them are wearing different hats, just like they are policemen, they are wearing a police hat, and some of them they are the guards, they are wearing that kind of huge, black hats in the UK. Brian: Ah, yes, the guards of Buckingham Palace. I think they are actually exclusively men, although our British colleague here can tell me if I’m wrong. Yoyo: The US First Lady Michelle Obama also responded on Twitter, saying she would like to see an emoji of a girl studying. Nick: Users of emojis may remember that last year they introduced smiley faces of various different skin colours, so instead of the default Lego-yellow little man that they had, there’s now a range of different skin colour smiley face emojis that you can choose, to make it more representative of you as a user when you’re sending them, and a number of people of various different backgrounds felt that that was more fitting for them to be able to send. Yoyo: Not long ago there has been a list about the ‘word of the year’ from the Oxford Dictionary, and the word of the year is the laugh-out-loud-with-tears emoji! Nick: There are also other uses for emojis – the invention of emoji passwords for your phone, or your various devices, because there are so many of them, there’s something like 700 unique emojis, whereas obviously – at least in English – there are only 26 letters, and there are 10 digits on the number pad. So there are so many more combinations that you could come up with that it’s a lot harder to crack that password if someone were to come across your phone. Yoyo: But also I have to say that with these emojis coming out, it represents rapid development of modern technologies, and everyone is using it. When people are talking online, sometimes you can’t see their body language. And these emojis come to help, because they can help you make yourself better understandable. But sometimes, this is also a double-edged sword, because you can see, if I didn’t use emojis in my language online, people might guess that I can be angry or upset when talking with them without emojis, so it can be a coin with two sides. Brian: Right, you’ve hit the nail right on the head of an interesting point, Wu You. If people get used to emojis and you don’t use them, then it’s like, is something going on there? So, magical emojis! Certainly they are a tool, and like any tool, if used widely, they can bring great benefits to mankind.