Earlier this summer, Microsoft released new emojis for their platforms.  If you’re a corporate slave staring at Teams all day, there is a palette of these smiling faces to inject some humanity into your daily drudgery.

Unfortunately for Microsoft, the humanity injected seems to be more of the scary-movie sort rather than the safe, neutral image software vendors want to provide.

Comments on Microsoft’s online forums include statements such as

• “Creepy and inappropriate”
• “Is Microsoft being run by pre-teens?”
• “Embarrassingly childish”
• “Faces are creepy looking”
• “Who got that assignment, a 5 yr. old?”

Ouch.

This experience highlights how difficult it is to translate even basic elements of human behavior across cultures, not to mention contexts.  We all smile, laugh, frown, or snarl.  But what looks cute in a bamboo-latte-and-hallway-scooters San Francisco software lab plays differently in a J.P. Morgan boardroom, to say nothing of how it’ll look in, say, Seoul, Tokyo, Mexico City, or Lagos.

Emojis have been around for 25 years (having developed from the earlier emoticon conventions, where symbols such as :-) were used to make faces).  I suspect that the original visual set and its later extensions have become a neutral, globally accepted symbol set in people’s minds.  After all, there is no human who is hairless, colored bright yellow, and has an ear-to-ear grin, yet this emerged a symbol of a smiling human.

You might like or dislike the image, but at this point it’s a symbol you’re long accustomed to.  It’s sort of like a common traffic sign – your feelings on the shape, color, etc. don’t matter to you because it’s been part of your world all your life.  Here in the US, a STOP sign is red with white letters on an octagon.  I have never heard anyone in my entire life say “man, stop signs are so ugly – I’d really prefer blue”.   But if your city introduces a new sign, you will have an opinion on it.

Emojis may be similar now.  We’ve all seen them for so long that we process only the symbol’s value (smile, cry, etc.) but don’t pause to evaluate the artistic qualities.  But when a new emoji set comes along that replaces the symbols we know, we form opinions.

Particularly when the new ones are – let’s be honest – pretty creepy.

raindog308

Raindog308 is a longtime LowEndTalk community administrator, technical writer, and self-described techno polymath. With deep roots in the *nix world, he has a passion for systems both modern and vintage, ranging from Unix, Perl, Python, and Golang to shell scripting and mainframe-era operating systems like MVS. He’s equally comfortable with relational database systems, having spent years working with Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.

As an avid user of LowEndBox providers, Raindog runs an empire of LEBs, from tiny boxes for VPNs, to mid-sized instances for application hosting, and heavyweight servers for data storage and complex databases. He brings both technical rigor and real-world experience to every piece he writes.

Beyond the command line, Raindog is a lover of German Shepherds, high-quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop RPGs, and hiking in deep, quiet forests.

His goal with every article is to help users, from beginners to seasoned sysadmins, get more value, performance, and enjoyment out of their infrastructure.

You can find him daily in the forums at LowEndTalk under the handle @raindog308.