Why tell the doctor where it hurts, when you could use emoji instead? Doctors could soon use emoji, those love-them-or-hate-them colourful successors to the humble emoticon, to communicate with patients and ease their diagnosis and recovery – or, if you prefer, 👨⚕️🗣️🖼️🤒🚑🏥🩺🤕. "It's tempting to dismiss emoji as a millennial fad, but they possess the power of standardisation, universality and …
So we're heading back to hieroglyphs... The writing was on the wall for some time.
Sure, it is easier to understand the picture of a duck than to remember what the abstract symbols "d"+"u"+"c"+"k" might mean, it also goes with the general dumbing-down simplification of peoples' though processes. With an emoji language you can't convey complex thoughts, and simple "eat"-"LOL"-"heart!" people are easier to manipulate keep happy.
""It's tempting to dismiss emoji as a millennial fad, but they possess the power of standardisation, universality and familiarity," claimed Shuhan He, MD"
I also don't buy it, see the mentioned eggplant. Emoji are not displayed uniformly across devices and interpretation of their meaning relies on the interplay between their appearance and cultural context. Hence innocent fruit and vegetables become suggestive. "Sure," you think, "People will always find ways to be rude with turnips." That little snorting smiley face that to most westerners looks angry? It was originally "Triumph" in Japan.
Egypt moved away from purely ideographic hieroglyphics, they came to be used for syllables and more generic ideas. Heiroglyphs were later on limited to cermonial use, for a long time it coexisted with the more day-to-day hieratic script. Chinese has similar ideographic roots, yet most characters no longer resemble the thing they represent, even when that was their original derivation (to pick one from my almost non-existent knowledge of Chinese, horse is just about recognisable as a horse in traditional script, and not really in simplified script). The one thing emoji have going for them if they want to endure is reliability in reproduction, while Chinese and Hieroglyphic scripts written by hand required lengthy training to reproduce.
Japan switched to using phonetic alphabets long ago, yet kept a subset of the Chinese characters (kanji) because they have a LOT of homonyms in the language and chinese characters probably disambiguate things well enough to keep using them (either that or tradition). But it DOES take a good part of Japanese and Chinese schooling JUST to learn to read and write. And everyone I've ever seen reading any significant amount Chinese writing (like a book) has to carry a dictionary and refer to it often.
This is why nearly EVERY language uses a phonetic alphabet. It just makes more sense. Humans generally communicate vocally. And our writing reflects that.
(and emoticons are NOT CUTE - they are MOSTLY NAUSEATING unless explicitly used for humor)
Icon, because there's not actually a VOMIT icon.
My wife recently got some noise-cancelling Bluetooth headphones. The instructions are almost entirely pictorial. Some of those are helpful - a Morse-code-like illustration of the blink pattern when it's trying to connect, for instance - but overall it's rather sad. Give me actual written directions any day!
(Why pictorial? Probably so they don't have to pay for translations.)
There's a machine at work with various warning signs on it, and I swear one of them looks like it means "only one person can shag this machine at a time". Given it's a health and safety warning, it's worrying that I genuinely have no idea what it is trying to say.
There's a machine at work with various warning signs on it
Das Machine is Nicht fur Gerfingerpoken un Mittingraben, is easy Schnappen der Springenwerk, Blowenfusen, und Poppencorken mit Spitensparken! Ist Nicht fur Gewerken by das Dumkopfen, das Rubbernecken Sightseeren. Keepen hands in der Pockets, Relaxen, und watch der Blinkenlights!
> Why pictorial?
Because they don't expect their potential clients to have mastered reading.
No, this isn't a quip, sadly, accessibility to illiterate people is the main argument for the ever increasing use of pictograms instead of written language. And since more and more people are illiterate (to some extent)...
Great. Illiteracy is a growing problem.
Solution ? Instead of putting in the effort to curb illiteracy, let's make everyone more stupid.
Wonderful. Civilization really is going places.
Mainly down, but still, we're going places.
Well find a study where the bar is set higher that backs up your assertion that illiteracy is increasing then. Simply stating that you disagree with a study is not the same as providing evidence to back up your position. It's more akin to putting your fingers in your ears and going "la la la, can't hear you".
If you want proof or increasing illiteracy within the UK go and talk to someone in industry or in high end education.
They will confirm that the level of illiteracy and lack of common sense, along with a lot of other shortcomings are on the increase. Sadly the level of entitlement and self belief is on the increase amongst the same people.
I have worked in my industry for almost 40 years and the level of ability amongst the last generation and possibly the one before is declining.
If you want to believe otherwise then feel free, just don't put the onus of proof onto those who know otherwise through years of experience. If you think we are wrong then you come up with the evidence against it.
I would not call that a LOW bar. Ask an average 15 year old educated in California to express his current physical or emotional state using a simile or a metaphor, and the LACK of response might surprise you.
Or not.
What we would call "basic language skills" seem to be LACKING. Schools used to teach people to express themselves in writing. I'm not sure WHAT they teach in these schools, these days...
I guess that wraps back to the "mime-like warning signs" "picture only instructions" and use of emoticons by physicians instead of the usual "show me where it hurts" or "let's have a look at it, then".
"My Brain Hurts"
or as a simile "It's like someone inside is jack-hammering his way out through my skull"
or as a metaphor "It's PURE HELL in my HEAD"
(where's the "My Brain Hurts" emoticon? It probably looks like Michael Palin)
The global rate yes, but the frightening problem is the number of illiterate people in the developed West, in particular the UK. We were the leaders in tech and innovation througout the industrial revolution and invented or built most of the infrastructure in the world but now we have a huge increase in the number of people who can't be arsed to get an education - even though it is provided free by the taxpayer - unlike a lot of the so called 'third world' nations rapidly overtaking us and the US.
The problem is, the pictograms are often ambiguous or have absolutely no relevance or context for the person looking at them.
The example in the article, I could actually correctly decipher 4 of the symbols, confused face (very apt), sad face, stethoscope (just about, given how small they are) and ambulance.
Nod.
I recently had the interesting experience of setting up a brand new monitor where the instructions were entirely pictorial.
Naturally en route to getting at the instructions, I took everything out of the box only for the first frame to convey the idea -eventually, I realised- that you connected the head of the stand with the screen in the box, still wrapped and face down, in order to protect it.
Then you connected the base by pushing and turning, followed by the tightening of screws, and *only then* would it tilt, raise/lower, or turn as expected. It needed to say so - I sat with the base half on and rotated at 45 degrees wondering what I'd done wrong for some minutes!...
For instructions, LEGO and Ikea do a reasonable job. If you think not, try some alternatives
And it wasn't necessarily the instructions that were the problem. Back when dinosaurs roamed the land I tried to put together an MFI table for someone. One vitally necessary bolt just refused to go in(*). When I looked closely at it, rather than the thread spiralling along the bolt there was a set of independent rings going round the bolt. I really have no idea how it could have been manufactured like that.
(*) Cue chorus of "at least you had a bolt, mine was missing" from those who miss MFI like they miss impacted wisdom teeth.
One pictorial list for several hundred languages in several scores of markets.
The set-up instructions for some pre-2000 things I bought had scores of pages of instructions and diagrams repeated in scores of languages; usually printed in text only an electron microscope could read. A single pictorial guide, if done well, would have been a *lot* cheaper, lighter and easier to pack.
Issuing them in English only would also have been easier but that would probably have irked the French.
Except, of course, that the reason it took so long to decipher hieroglyphic was entirely due to the misconception that the language was either ideographic or pictographic.
Hieroglyphs represent phonemes.
Now, if you'd gone with Chinese, or Mayan, or (etc ad nauseum) you'd have had a point.
In modern Chinese, it's largely not the case either. Only a few characters are somewhat ideographic, like 山 or 伞. But the meaning of single characters has long diverged from the sum of their components, and words are composed of multiple sounds, not the meaning of their character components.
> Now, if you'd gone with Chinese, or Mayan, or (etc ad nauseum) you'd have had a point.
Sorry, can't determine who you're talking to. If it was me, I wrote "hieroglyphs" meaning "pictographic logograph", because I didn't expect everybody around to know what a "logograph" is, but everybody is bound to know what hieroglyphs are (i.e. pictures meaning words).
It is true that logographies are impossible to use as such alone, sooner or later you need to encode more abstract notions like sounds for which there is no possible image. Mayan glyphs also occasionally encoded syllables. And at some point in the distant future, emojis will start encoding syllables too...
@TeeCee - "Now, if you'd gone with Chinese, or Mayan, or (etc ad nauseum) you'd have had a point."
Apparently only about 600 Chinese characters are pictographic, so, with over 50,000 characters total, that's less than 1.2%. If 1.2% of the Latin alphabet were pictographic, that would be about one corner and horizontal of E ... obviously representing a shelf, right?
It's easier only if you already know what a duck looks like, and if the emoji on whatever device you're using is matching the sort of duck you know.
Now, I kind of liked the idea, but then, it seems a little optimistic to hope that people who don't know how to read will know well enough what a heart or lungs look like to match it with a stylized emoji. Even most educated people can't even place precisely their organs.
And then there's scale. Will the emoji of the liver be the same size as one for the kidneys?
I suppose they'll have to work on that.
The problem is, with the example in the story, I see white man in white shirt, coloured person, TV, confused emoticon, ambulance, office block, stethoscope, sad emoticon.
I'm sure most medical terms and Latin names don't have emoticons. When I go to the doctor's, here in Germany, they speak German, which is a 2nd language to me, but the medical terms, especially the latin names, are universal.
A couple of times, the doctor has used the colloquial German name for an illness. I've never heard the name or can't relate to it, so they have used the Latin name, which is the same in the UK and Germany, because, Latin, and I knew what the doctor was talking about.
I'd rather they dropped back to Latin names than start showing me meaningless symbols.
I just checked emojipedia. Lung cancer, leukemia and meningococcus also Neisseria meningitidis. None of them have an associated emoji.
What is the doctor going to show you if you have lung cancer? sad smiley, crying smiley, blue face, screaming and gravestone? Very helpful!
"With an emoji language you can't convey complex thoughts"
No, but what you CAN do is communicate simple thoughts between people who either don't share a language or who for some reason or another (including possible medical issues) cannot communicate orally and/or in writing.
It's not going to replace / improve upon a proper patient-doctor chat, but if it adds some tools to plug (small) gaps in the current toolbox, why not?
As long as it remains an option for those that need it and doesn't become the default.
I read and write several hundred thousand words a week. I see a few smilies and hearts. The problem is, a lot of emojis are just as non-obvious as words. If you don't use them regularly, they can slow down comprehension or confuse.
Because in medicine you need accuracy perhaps ?
How long will it take someone to sue the NHS when their emoji turns out to mean something else. Bowel cancer / leukemia / insert other condition here... is pretty much unequivocal. A tiny bloody smiley symbol could mean anything.
If your Doc says you have prostate cancer you don't go off to a party thinking that you are OK, but if you only have a smiley face that could signify anything then you could potentially do just that.
Fucking stupid idea and a further dumbing down of communication routes that have been well established for hundreds if not thousands of years.
I do think that humanity has run it's course and this type of bollocks is the cure, much like Covid-19 being the solution for the planet and not the problem.
"Sure, it is easier to understand the picture of a duck than to remember what the abstract symbols "d"+"u"+"c"+"k" might mean"
Only if you've seen a duck. Even recognising it as an image of some sort of bird takes knowledge of wildlife.
I don't drive a car. There are road-signs I find baffling though they are made as simplistic as possible. I could look them up but I don't find them worth the effort.
Signs of containers, lorries, shops and footpaths I also sometimes lack the knowledge to interpret. Whether this puts me in mortal dangers or not I have no idea.
I would were they to use English.
Without having REAL daily enemies to slay, just to stay alive, it seems that an IDIOCRACY filled with compliant sheeple of lower average intelligence (and tyrannical "leaders" of even LOWER intelligence) may be INEVITABLE... (no need to be smart and/or clever just to survive)
If I must use an emoticon, see icon (that, or the middle finger)
Pictures are worth *zero* words to the blind, so how do you propose to make someone whom can't see your pretty pictures use said images to convey anything at all?
My screen reader goes silent when it comes across one, I get SFA if I try to select one, and a "character map" style interface is pointless since it's a purely visual-only means of interaction -- I can't select a specific icon if the screen reader can't read the icon in the first place.
Ohhh, interesting point, following on from my other post, people interpret on their appearance. There's no reason a screen reader couldn't read out the emoji name for you, but that may not always match what a sighted person would interpret the pictorial form to mean.
Granted that there could be some ironic meaning which could be lost in a description but as for the emojiis creating silence on a screen reader, I agree that at least for some of them, they could be described by their name.
There seems to be a common expression which I use daily on Slack, Discord and WhatsApp (and also very poorly supported in MS Teams chat). Which is simple text expressions such as :laughing: or :man_shrugging:
I hope that other chat providers and other tools will adopt support for this, especially as it works as a pretty convenient way to input them in a 'real' keyboard.
Emoji are decided on by the Unicode Consortium. They partly descend from a similar system in Japan. Entertaining video on the topic
This is an excellent point. Pictorial systems can work pretty well for people who have trouble communicating verbally due to language differences or disabilities, but are a complete and total failure for folks who have poor or no vision. Verbal or written (via screen reader) should always be available because of this.
This is a reasonable solution for when a doctor and sighted patient do not have a common language. I would go with clip art on paper but that is less good for a COVID compatible consultation by phone.
For blind and no common language perhaps google translate and a screen reader does something useful.
Most clinical system also won't support the use of emoji. Additionally as emoji are controlled by private companies in terms of which ones are available etc on platforms they may change over time which makes them unusable from a records management perspective unless a suitable solution is found.
My father worked in a research unit in Gastrointestinal medicine in Glasgow. They were pioneers before their time in what we now call expert systems as applied to medicine. They found that people would be more open and honest in giving answers to GI symptoms when asked by computer.
HE tole me that when foreign doctors (read English too) came to Glasgow they had to be given language coaching 'A huv the dry boak doctor'
Any blacked out squares are that way because they have been Censored For Your Sanity by the Multidimensional Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Sentient Beings. I and my tentacular friends protest this bias on the grounds that too many of the HentaiDemon iconography gets removed with claims of causing permenant psychological scarring. Scarring?! There's nothing scar-causing about-
*Screen goes black with bright friendly green letters* This post has been Censored for Your Sanity by the Multidimensional Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Sentient Beings. Nothing to see here, please move along." (The HHG "green blob guy" smiling & giving the thumb's up sign.).
OK, I'll bite
I HATE emojis, imbecilic, impenetrable.
I, apparently, cannot discriminate
a. what they are (i.e.picture)
b. what the one I HAVE identified means.
How about WRITE IT IN ENGLISH (or your chosen language)
They are too tied to "under 30yrs of age" memes/cultural norms/"hipness"
FFS "txt speak" was bad enough...
Dumbing diagnosis down with emojis or any other simplistic pictorial system can only leave more room for incorrect diagnosis. A problem that is often bad enough using the spoken or the written word, which frequently fails to convey the symptoms a patient is trying to describe.
You only have to listen to an average conversation to realise a good percentage of people don't know how to construct an intelligible sentence most of the time, what chance do emojis have?
I still call them smilies
As to Text Speak, much to confusing, and I have seen text written like that LONGER than the correct word.
And a lot of them are actually things in their own right.
If I see B4 in a random message I ask them why they are on about British railway carriage bogies.
My response to professional communications sent by text or using such bollocks has always been to send it back and ask for an intelligible communication using a recognised language.
Any one will do, I will sort out from there but this sort of shit lazy communication has become endemic and the use of emoji bollocks just makes it more poitlessly complex to save people from actually composing a sentence.
And yes, before anyone asks, I have lost work through this but frankly if people can only communicate in visual grunts then I have no desire or need to work for them.
Response of the week !
I can communicate freely in 4 languages and in a restricted way in a number of others. We really need to stop dumbing down for the sake of the imbecillic who forego a free education ( in the UK at least ) but yet are at the forefront of entitled whining to have things dumbed down to suit their needs.
I personally love emojis, although I believe they are best used in combination with written text in order to disambiguate the meaning and tone of the message.
Back when SMS was pretty new, one of the criticisms of sending text messages (apart from how it might take one longer to type the message than it would to just trying the person and tell them) was that text alone is very easily misinterpreted by the receiver. I've certainly had messages and emails like this, where I manage to read something bad from something neutral or even positive or vice-versa.
By adding emojis it becomes easier to add the equivalent of a facial expression that one might use if one were talking face to face.
In extremis: "You're a dick! :angry_face:" vs "You're a dick! :Laughing:" should hopefully clear up whether this is anger or banter.
Likewise, more subtly, "Great!" In response to something could mean good or it could be a sarcastic expression. Addition of a smiley face it one with rolling eyes should make the intention of the writer much clearer.
I don't use a huge range of emojiis but I do use them all the time (and it irks me that our beloved el-reg comments don't support them!) From happy/sad/silly/angry faces, rolling eyes, grimacing, shrugging and the three wise monkeys (Sidenote: FFS What the hell is wrong with people sending monkey emojis as a racial slur: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-58503093 - not cool!!)
So I'm glad we have these to augment our written language - no doubt there's also countless possibilities for emojis to help where there's a language barrier or learning disability as well.
It will be interesting to see whether they get further adopted into use for professional purposes... Right now on my corporate machine I'm stuck with Outlook covering very limited smiled into characters from the Wingdings font!
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To be honest i just ignore them as i have no idea what most of them are meant to represent, and unless you have good eyesight they can be hard to read.
IN windows some icons are hard to identify (what the hell are they representing) so i prefer to hover my mouse over them so i can read the text.
There is only so much meaning you can have in a tiny little picture.
This probably highlights the current inconsistency of how they are displayed. In my experience, Windows does not render them very well.
On mobile devices I think they're much clearer although another commenter rightly pointed out that they're not consistently drawn between all applications.
Although surely if a picture paints a thousand words, a tiny emoji still has to be worth perhaps one hundred?
I was a tad surprised by the downvotes on this and then I re-read it.
I've managed (perhaps somewhat ironicly) to miss a really, REALLY important bit of punctuation in my post!
It should say "What the hell is wrong with people!?! Sending monkey emojis as a racial slur.... - not cool"
I absolutely mean what is wrong with the people who do it and think it's somehow okay, and NOT what is wrong with doing it! Sorry to anyone who was offended.
There's no substitute for a properly punctuated sentence.
Peace and good vibes to all!
I once spent a fascinating couple of hours with a colleague who explained how to dismantle Chinese script, What he demonstrated is that if you know enough of the cultural background then you can read Chinese in English, its actually a language independent script. This makes sense given the age and size of China and the numerous ethnic and cultural groups that comprise the country but it has some obvious limitations, one being that you have to either rote learn a whole bunch of pictograms and how to use them or you have to have a deep understanding of cultural history. (This colleague was a programmer but that was just his day job -- his avocation was poetry.)(Chinese poetry is something else -- its form includes its shape, for example.)
Emojis are low rent pictograms. They are not useful as language (IMHO) although my medical provider uses them to illustrate pain scales (look it up....).
A picture is worth a thousand words. Especially at a time where education is going so low in many countries that people aren't able to write correctly their own language. The important thing in that case is to be understood, so let's adapt to the possibilities of the clients patients.
A picture being worth a thousand words is exactly the problem. If you want to convey a specific meaning, having to guess exactly which words the picture is intended to be worth is virtually impossible. Much art is based heavily on the principle that everyone sees a different interpretation of a picture. Guessing what people mean by a series of emojis is literally a game - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concept_(board_game)
"Especially at a time where education is going so low in many countries that people aren't able to write correctly their own language."
You have that exactly backwards. Education and literacy are higher now than they have ever been before. Go back a century or two and the majority of people could barely read or write at all. Go back further than that and literacy was reserved for a tiny minority of scribes. The reason literacy can appear poor these days is precisely because almost everyone can write, so you actually see the writing of the less well educated and are able to compare it to that of more literate people. And of course because of the internet you actually have the opportunity to see some of that writing without having to dig through their private letters. The problem isn't that people are getting worse at writing, it's that you never used to notice how bad they were because they didn't used to write at all.
Purely pictorial instructions are an evil thing to me, because when I see an icon I don't understand, especially if it's one not used by farcebook or twatter, I have *no idea* what to do with it'; worse if the meaning is *ambiguous* in context. Also, do you see what I did there? Asterisking for emphasis (in lieu of bold), capital letter at the start of a sentence, and punctuation marks. Good luck symbolising that with emojis.
Emoji are originally an extension of the Japanese writing system, which seemingly didn't have enough letters, to express everything perfectly (irony alert!). So we could just go back to using the original pictograms from where their writing system originates.
Why not write everything in kanji (Chinese characters)?
Of the emojis in the first paragraph [*******@*.] one does not display in my browser.
I find this is common and becoming more so with each passing month. I am sure that it is my fault for not religiously updating everything but as a few blank squares are the only result I am reluctant to engage in that much hard work.
I am fully cognisant of the fact that eventually *no* emoji will be properly displayed on my box and I will forever after be rendered unable to communicate with any of the inhabitants of this planet.
That prospect does not fill me with fear and sadness.
Oh. "The post contains some characters we can’t support". Yes, those would be the damnable emojis I tried to quote from the article, yes?
I have replaced them with asterisks. :)
Okay, that wasn't it. It must have been the unviewable one, so I've replace *that* with a "@".
This is "fun".
[Post-posting edit] Okay, that worked.
The smiling blob of brown sludge was, for some time, interpreted as a "Happy Ice-Cream Man" by my innocent little brain.
I thought the vocalised interpretation that I heard on USAlien TV was something else; something I had never seen.
Smart or not, I am sometimes not very aware of modern culture.
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