Utopia Talk / Politics / A significant step towards inclusivity

Victim Member	Sun Feb 10 07:14:55 Best news of the year so far! http://www...mojis-are-their-way-ncna969331 From interracial couples to people with disabilities: More inclusive emojis are on their way They're an extension of our everyday language and, now, more inclusive emojis are coming to your smartphone's keyboard. Feb. 9, 2019 Love them or hate them, emojis are a burgeoning part of our digital vocabulary. In 2017 (on National Emoji Day, no less), Facebook shared that over 5 billion emojis are sent on its Messenger platform daily. As of last June, emoji users had over 2800 choices of emojis, according to Emojipedia, suggesting no shortage of options. But don’t let that number fool you. There has in fact been a dire lack of emojis to reflect our diverse world. Fortunately, that is beginning to change. Unicode Consortium introduced it's unveiling 59 new distinct emojis (75 when you factor in gender variations, and 280 when you consider skin tone options). While Emoji 12.0 comes with some fairly trivial newbies (a melting ice cube and a yo-yo, for instance), it also offers users an array of other options we haven’t seen before, such as a prosthetic arm and leg, a person in a wheelchair (both manual and automatic), a person with a probing cane, a deaf person, an ear with a hearing aid, a service dog, interracial couples and gender neutral couples. Unicode did not reply to our immediate request for comment, but noted in their announcement that the new keyboard will be available on mobile phones later this year. New emojis may not seem like groundbreaking territory, but this is a significant step towards inclusivity and representation of people that are all too often marginalized by mainstream society. Until now, the language of emojis has left out disabled people “Representation is a common topic within the disability community,” says Kendall Brown, a disability advocate and digital strategist. “Disabled people are rarely depicted in popular media, and when we are, it's nearly always simply as a secondary figure meant to help the main character learn something and it's almost always played by an able-bodied actor.” Brown lives with invisible disabilities including Crohn’s disease and a spine disorder. These types of disabilities are not featured in the new fleet of emojis, but the new options are still a welcome update for her. “While the new disabled emojis don't directly visually represent my personal health conditions or how others perceive my body, it still feels like they represent my experience and my community, in a way,” she says. “At the very least, they certainly represent an acknowledgement that disabled people exist, and that feels good.” Emojis are a subset of language, and language, as Omar Sultan Haque, MD, PhD, a physician, social scientist and philosopher at Harvard Medical School, points out, fails us when it does not offer us the opportunity for enriched expression. “If our vocabulary is impoverished, we’re constrained in important ways,” Haque tells NBC News BETTER. “The richness of our language should match the richness of human experience, and that includes electronic language which is only getting more popular.” Haque adds that these emojis may seem like “simple or even silly” fixes to the bigger societal problem of marginalization, but they’re incredibly useful and needed tools. “These emojis are contributing to a social model of disability teaching,” says Haque. “If you enhance opportunities for people to represent their experience in the world, the possible negative impacts of that disability are diminished, similar to how a functional crosswalk can lessen the challenge of crossing the street if you’re visually impaired. [More over], being able to represent the non-typical bodily state can be not only empowering, but a way in which people can communicate their experiences.” People in interracial relationships will also now have emoji representation. Rosalind Chow, associate professor of organizational behavior and theory at Carnegie Mellon University's Tepper School of Business, says the "option is great for this sense of feeling equally valued and included by society.” Chow notes that her daughter enjoys sending emojis that portray her parents, but hasn’t yet been given the choice of an accurate representation. “She could never find emojis that represented our racial composition,” Chow says. “I’m Asian and my husband is white. We always ended up as the white couple — at least we had the brunette option.” Diverse emojis are good for business Chow adds that these more inclusive updates to communication systems are also important from a business perspective, using case studies in schools as an example. “Business schools have struggled for a long time with gender equality, and one thing that was identified as causing women to feel as though they didn't belong was that all business school cases featured male protagonists,” Chow says. “Harvard recently started generating cases of female protagonists so everyone could see and imagine women being in leadership positions. It's about reflecting reality as well as what society has as an aspiration.”
Victim Member	Sun Feb 10 07:20:31 Though not everything is fine as the period pants were rejected http://www...ji-menstruation-blood-donation Bloody brilliant: new emoji to symbolize menstruation welcomed The red blood droplet with a period-positive message is hailed as a step forward but some see it as a half-measure ... The organization began work on the emoji in 2017 after finding that 48% of girls and women in the UK between the ages of 14 and 21 are embarrassed by their periods. “Ending the shame around periods begins with talking about it,” Lucy Russell, the head of girls’ rights and youth at Plan International UK told the Guardian. Plan organized a popular vote on the design of the symbol, with five options including a sanitary pad, a monthly calendar, smiling blood droplets and a uterus. A pair of “period pants” eventually won the contest, but Unicode Consortium, the body that maintains and regulates emojis, rejected the choice. Eventually, Plan partnered with NHS Blood and Transplant to share that organization’s proposed new emoji: a red blood droplet. ...
Rugian Member	Sun Feb 10 08:01:24 Finally, a New Emoji to Mock Men The latest batch of emojis features new possibilities for shattering fragile masculinities and capitalism alike. By VICE Staff | Feb 5 2019, 9:21pm Great news! We’re finally getting an emoji that’s perfect for easily humiliating men when they’re being disgusting online or, you know, being men: the small dick emoji. Officially named “pinching hand,” the emoji has been approved by the Unicode Consortium for release across major platforms this year. It’s also great for illustrating capitalism’s failures by capturing the inadequate minimum wage or your lackluster salary. The possibilities are endless. Countless men who aren’t secure in their masculinity will be affected by the new option, we know. But it was high time to replace the purple eggplant—which, as a 2015 study confirmed, everyone obviously used as a dick—for something more realistic. http://www...men-pinching-hand-emoji-update
Rugian Member	Sun Feb 10 08:10:40 ^so much for inclusivity. Stupid cisgender heteronormative male scum.
jergul large member	Sun Feb 10 08:16:25 Ruggy Oh, come on. That emoji is great. Please grow a 🍐
jergul large member	Sun Feb 10 08:17:10 Yay me :-)
Rugian Member	Sun Feb 10 08:26:37 For some reason, Firefox renders that as orange with a green stem. Also only women use emojis.
Rugian Member	Sun Feb 10 08:38:42 For the record, I am not at all against disparaging emojis. I eagerly await the no doubt imminent release of any misogynistic symbols the consortium has signed off on.
hood Member	Sun Feb 10 08:51:26 Can't we just make fun of women for having an even smaller penis?
jergul large member	Sun Feb 10 10:49:28 Ruggy Cherries for tits, peaches for ass. Knock yourself out.
Rugian Member	Sun Feb 10 14:21:49 Jergul, Not what I'm talking about and you know it.
jergul large member	Sun Feb 10 15:15:47 Ruggy My point is still valid. We have to emojis to be as misogynistic as our hearts desire.
jergul large member	Sun Feb 10 15:16:05 the emojis*
Forwyn Member	Sun Feb 10 16:37:57 Simulating body parts is misogynistic now?
jergul large member	Sun Feb 10 16:45:37 Forwyn If you put some effort into it, then sure.
jergul large member	Sun Feb 10 16:51:03 🍑 🕳
Cherub Cow Member	Sun Feb 10 19:37:48 Inclusivity only for weak-willed Ghandi fellators? ;p .. I want more gun emoji options. Right now it’s just a green squirt gun ( can UtopiaForums handle :D[fire][green gun]? nope .. had to bracket everything that didn't show up :/) We should have MP5s, chain guns, AT4s, revolvers, etc... if Dukhat comes back, people need to be able to use a 50cal emoji, [fire]fire emoji, and interracial emojis to joke about hate crimes and earn a "You just got called a cuckservative by Dukhat" medallion [medal]. Being able to use the small penis emoji for Bernie Sanders is a good start, but we have a lot of emojis to go before true inclusivity has been achieved... you know, like a mixed race narwhal Santa Claus using a BFG to cripple an albino trans-person who has 1488 carved into xim’s forehead — i.e., basic conversation starters on Jezebel.com
Nimatzo iChihuaha	Mon Feb 11 03:46:07 I want a ”whore” emoji. Or rather two, the good kind of whore you call your gf/wife and the dirty useless whore you call jerguls sister. ;-)
Nimatzo iChihuaha	Mon Feb 11 03:48:56 The irony is that the alot of the types who celebrate this on social media are also the types who think you shouldn’t body shame. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Pillz Member	Mon Feb 11 11:12:59 Emoticons4lyf
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