Comment on Is there any significance to people using emojis that match their skin tone?
SpaceCadet@feddit.nl 4 weeks agoMy point is that everyone, who is being honest at least, interprets the Simpsons as being white. Do you think they’re white?
Yes, I think they’re white but I think it’s not relevant in a discussion about emojis.
As I said, it’s no surprise the default emoji is closest to white skin. Even if that association comes from the Simpsons, emojis didn’t come out until decades after the Simpsons became a cultural mainstay.
My point is that yellow smiley faces have been a cultural mainstay independent of the Simpsons, and that you grossly overestimate the worldwide cultural impact of the Simpsons. Most of the non-US world didn’t even get the Simpsons on TV until the mid 1990s while smiley face t-shirts and pins were all the rage in the late 1980s and 1990s.
And decades? The Simpsons started in 1989, while the first instant messengers already had smiley face emoticons in the mid 90s.
EatATaco@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
If we are talking about “why are there different skin tone emojis” it’s absolutely relevant to point out examples of how the alleged “neutral” emoji color is typically interpreted as a white skin tone.
The Simpsons came out in 88. You are saying most of the world got the Simpsons about half a decade later. I would say this proves the exact opposite of your point and that it is a huge world cultural phenomena. I’m shocked that I’m having the defend the Simpsons as one of the most important and impactful TV shows of all time.
Emoticon != emoji. Characters don’t have skin tone colors. The first emojis didn’t come out until 1999. It wasn’t until mid 2000s when they gained popularity world wide, and it wasn’t until 2010 that they were accepted into unicode. It may be a fair point to claim that decades is too long, but it’s at least a decade.
I was born in 1978. I remember the smiley face pins being a quick passing fad, not some mainstay. Certainly not even remotely on the level of the Simpsons. But regardless of how popular they are, it doesn’t detract from my point: the yellow is close to white and interpreted as white. It might even further drive home my point because (although it’s a bit circular here) probably part of the reason it gained such widespread financial success is because of it’s proximity to whiteness.
SpaceCadet@feddit.nl 4 weeks ago
My point is, I didn’t even hear about the Simpsons until I was in Uni, which puts it around 1995-ish, but I sure knew what a yellow smiley was.
I meant smileys really, because that’s what they were initially called. Emojis is a more recent retroactive rebranding/appropriation of smileys by Apple when they launched the iphone.
Anyway ICQ had yellow smiley faces 1996-ish. AIM had them 1997-ish. Yahoo!Pager, later Yahoo!Messenger, had yellow smileys in 1998. And MSN definitely had them in 1999.
And then there’s friggin minesweeper that had a yellow smiley face all the way back in 1992:
Image
I guess they all watched too much Simpsons?
EatATaco@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
My reference to the Simpsons has nothing to do with claiming this is where yellow emojis came from. My reference to the Simpsons is to point out that yellow skin tone is clearly adjacent to whiteness and this was well established before emojis caught widespread support in the mid/late aughts.
The fact that others also used yellow emojis financially successfully does not contradict the claim that it’s clearly adjacent to whiteness. If anything, it reinforces the claim.
SpaceCadet@feddit.nl 4 weeks ago
Not it was not and it still isn’t. The reason we think of the Simpsons as white is because the context makes it crystal clear that they’re a typical white suburban family, not because of their color. If Matt Groening had made Simpsons green, purple or blue we’d still think of them as white, and at the same time smileys and later emojis would still be yellow. At best there is some parallel evolution here in the sense that both Matt Groening and Harvey Ball both chose yellow for the same reason: because it is perceived as a bright happy color.
If you then associate yellowness exclusively with whiteness that’s purely a you thing, and honestly I find it pretty fucked up to see racial connotations like this in the most innocent things. Stop projecting your own prejudices.
My argument is that bright yellow smileys have their own cultural lineage dating back to 1963, and it has nothing to do with skin color or race. Using these yellow smileys to express emotion in computer programs has been a thing since at least the mid nineties, not the mid/late aughts as you claim. The reason that it only appeared in the mid nineties and not earlier is technological and cultural. It has to do with the developing graphical and networking capabilities of computers around that time, and because smileys were popular in other aspects of culture around the same time. It has nothing to do with The Simpsons or other supposedly white cartoon characters.
DjMeas@lemm.ee 4 weeks ago
I believe emoji was a Japanese creation, not a Apple creation: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji