Heart Emoji is pointless

Shortly after Wired’s Global Editional Director launched in 2023, she sent me a Slack message. I happened to do so. Message from my very serious, very new boss. He pursues me to this day.

I have no memory of what the message said, but only a prolonged shame in the shape of a heart. When I realized my mistake a few hours after the case, I panicked. Did you remove it? To be kidding? Leave my job? Ultimately, I swapped it with a 👍 Sometime after work hfuls and prayed she would register exact None of this.

The reason for my mistake is that it has become a Slack reaction that shows the best emoji used when you stay for comment. That is, the hearing of my boss’s message was part of a bigger problem: all the time I heard messages from colleagues. The more I looked, the more I realized that this was happening everywhere. Slack, of course, but also in texts one on one, group chats, where I could react with ×, I would do it.

It wasn’t just me. A literal reporter of the front line war in Ukraine was wrong my signal message, saying I would contact him for a step. The group chat of my main friends is the conquest in cardiac messages of all kinds. Of course, my wife and I are angry with the texts of each other constantly, so much that it fails to do so becomes a fine hint that one of us is either very busy or wrong. The heart Emoji obviously has become a way of subjected to fine communication with each other. The point is that you announce what? It seems that its meaning is shifting with the context to the extent that it is not at all fixed meaning – except when you use it wrong.

Neil horse, a cognitive scientist who focuses on visual communication and associate professor at the University of Tilburg in the Netherland You use it.

“Otherwise, you get into trouble if you send a red heart to the wrong person instead of a white heart!” Says Kon. “It has become a serious problem, considering that lawsuits They even depend on whether sending emoji to colleagues is sexual harassment. “

Yikes.

Generally speaking, the shape of the heart has been used as a symbol for hundreds of years and it also shifts over time. ” prominent theory Well, the seed of Silifius of Africa in ancient times is shaped like a heart and used as an aphrodisiac, “says horse. “So he is associated with sex and only later, through Christians, he contacted love.”

These Christians have accepted the idea of ​​the sacred heart and have been unleashed for millennia, promoting the heart as a symbol of adoration in Western culture to the extent that it now provokes a distinctive feature and shit chocolates more than the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.

The hearts were among the first symbols of Unicode created in the early Internet of the 90s that would do it Later become emoji on today., According to EmojipediaS Issued as part of Unicode 1.1 in 1993, “❤” initially shared the name of its predecessor of the predecessor “Heavy Black Heart”. Until 2014. rst was cited as the most popular “word” in the worldS Now this is Emoji by default practically wherever you can write – and there are problems.