Framing a healthy approach to the challenges presented by emoji
reactions and other novelties. Honest to yourself, have you ever
thought that random 30-seconds clips could compete for popularity with
full feature-length movies?
On 2024-12-02 12:39, Anne P. Mitchell, Esq. via mailop wrote:
I'm not sure whether this was meant to be tongue-in-cheek,
No tongue-in-cheek. Consider I was answering:
On 2024-12-01 10:40, Carsten Schiefner via mailop wrote:
> just a smiley instead of a full and decent response
a tongue-in-cheek response would have been "Ach, Englisch, anstatt sich
der präzisen Grammatik der deutschen Sprache zu bedienen." No offense
meant to English, German, or other language speakers.
FACT: languages are living bodies of conventions common to two or more
individuals. Emojis are the glyphs of new languages in the making. I
get to learn every day when my teenager communicates with me. Yes, it
is sometimes frustrating, but the frustration is mostly with myself for
not catching fast enough the kids' evolving slang.
The lines between (national/regional/tribal) languages are blurring more
frequently and faster than they have always been blurring in the past.
Readers may delight themself with a search for the etymology of modern
day common words such as "budget" to get a sense for the process that is
being accelerated, possibly to the speed of breakage.
Not only the speedometer breaks. If UTF-8 encoding was (and maybe still
is) a challenge for some software / e-mail pipelines, imagine medieval
Goethe setting up the printing press with (colorful, please) emojis; or
the book-preserving monks reproducing emojis with ink and feather.
Fascinating! For software devs and admins: are we just clumsily
patching add-on functionality for which the systems were not designed,
only because it is cool to mimic other "apps"? And pushing the agreed
conventions and protocols further toward breakage? The addition of
emojis reminds me the addition of HTML to email -- something that I am
still allergic to these days (accessibility!)
Elsewhere in this thread:
> there is an "experimental" RFC9078.
Inflation is not only a monetary phenomenon. There is an inflation of
RFCs too, and often with diminishing returns. In another inflationary
area with diminishing returns I heard of a PhD degree awarded for a
study of the brownian motion of water vapor with different shower
curtains. Whatever the practical value.
but speaking from a legal perspective, at very least, outside of the
> criminal law arena (i.e. so in civil law) a response of any kind,
> including just a single emoji, carries a great more weight than a
> lack of any response.
Correct. Law is just a convention and in the West we have granted the
accused the right to silence so they do not self-incriminate. But it
was not always this way and "qui tacet consentire videtur" -- silence
implies consent -- probably imported from Canon Law still applied to the
trial of Sir Thomas More:
https://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/the-treason-of-sir-thomas-more/
Correct again on the civil context where one still has to explicitly
justify their silence. In correspondence with opposing counsel I more
than once expressed in writing "my lack of response to my learned
colleague is not to be interpreted as agreement with their statements.
It is merely economy of time and ink until the issue is in front of a
relevant decision-maker." I wish there were accepted emojis for similar
statements; and for boilerplate clauses such as the now ubiquitous
waiver clauses, too.
> As to the way to interpret the emoji (thumb up? thumb down? smiley
> face?) that would depend almost entirely on the thread of the
> correspondence, and the legal documents involved which are the subject
> of the correspondence.
Agree. Context always has, and I dare to advance always will one of the
most important determinant factors. And while I try to keep an open
mind on emojis, I am annoyed at the burden they put on the reader to
understand what meaning the sender ascribes to them. But then, are we
not burdened by other linguistic devices such as syntax and grammar?
Y.
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