In the last National Assessment of Adult Literacy, 43% of Americans were assessed as having "basic or below basic" literacy. They can extract basic factual information from short, straightforward texts, but little more than that.
Here are a couple of example questions from that test.
Only 33% of Americans could describe what is expressed in the following poem:
"The pedigree of honey Does not concern the Bee - A clover, any time, to him Is Aristocracy"
Either a literal or thematic description of the poem constitutes an acceptable answer.
Read the text at the link below. After reading this text, only 16% of Americans could describe the purpose of the Se Habla Español expo.
https://nces.ed.gov/NAAL/sample_imgtxtequiv.asp?Imageid=164
Acceptable answers include any statement such as the following: "to enable people to better serve and sell to the Hispanic community", "to improve marketing strategies to the Hispanic community" and "to enable people to establish contacts to serve the Hispanic community".
Did you get the right answer? 84% of Americans didn't. Bear that in mind when you're writing documentation or dialog boxes.
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/writing-for-lower-literacy-...
That's intentionally misleading and it's thrown around frequently without clarification of what the basic and below basic levels exactly mean, how they compare to the rest of the world, and who is in the figures (a lot of non-English speaking immigrants), usually to try to prove points.
The US basic literacy level is a high bar compared to what 95% of the planet actually tests at. Over half of China is below basic by the US standard. Over half of Eastern Europe is below the US basic line, including Russia.
In the US ~44% of the below basic population are non-native English speakers, who didn't speak English at all prior to starting school. 39% are Hispanic adults. Ie this group overwhelmingly consists of currently or originally low skill, poor immigrants (people that wouldn't even be allowed into most other developed nations such as Canada).
Demonstrating that effect in action, 43% of hispanic adults test poorly in literacy, compared to about 10% of white adults. Gee, I wonder if immigration into a new culture + language barrier has something to do with these numbers.
Despite a vast immigration flow of low skill, poor, low English literate persons since 1980, the US literacy rate didn't drop meaningfully. That means literacy rates for the base population increased.
Despite all of that, the US is the 7th most literate nation on earth, in front of: Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, France, New Zealand, Belgium, Israel, South Korea, Italy, Ireland, Russia.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2016/03/...
Americans are well educated relative to the global population. That isn't what we're discussing. OP is explaining why large swaths of the population might prefer communicating with pictures over words. It isn't that they can't understand words. Just that parsing and constructing language to express complex thoughts isn't a common experience for many, for whatever reason. Emojis fill that gap.
In a globalised world, a great many people are frequently communicating in a language that they have not fully mastered. South Africa has eleven official languages. India has 22. Globally, non-native English speakers outnumber native speakers by two-to-one. Hindi/Urdu has a roughly equal number of first and second language users.
But as for deciding it exists because people aren't smart enough to use words, U+1F914.
(I know this thread isn't about the methodology of literacy assessment, but now I'm really curious to know how they do it. Does publicly available question-level response data exist somewhere out there? from previous years?)
It's also interesting how they work as reactions. If you hit "like" on something, for instance, you don't have to explain why you approve or add your own commentary, you just indicate your approval. And if you write a comment on a thread, there's a certain expectation that it contain an original thought or that it demands a response. So reactions manage to avoid a lot of inane filler.
For a good illustration, watch a thread on Facebook where they say "type AMEN if you agree!" and you get a thousand people tediously writing it out. If there were just a little prayer emoji and a counter, you get closer to their actual intent, since that's literally what "amen" means.
"meh"
1) The emoji has several possible interpretations/meanings depending on context, such as "I don't know", "I don't care", "indifference" or "shrug". There's this saying, "a picture says a thousand words". It applies here (nobody said the words couldn't be a few words in hundreds of different languages ;)).
2) The emoji generally does not require translation to different languages. It isn't universal, but its more accessible, and some emojis are certainly universal (such as :) which is a facial expression my 3 month old understands).
Really good point. I don't find watching a keynote speeches about emoji at all exciting, either. But I work on a mixed-language engineering team with a lot of (extremely smart, highly literate) people, and we use emoji all the time.
Whether it's cold-sweat-face or thinking-face really helps me understand the nuance of my colleague's Japanese comments (which, btw, as a native English speaker with only fair Japanese ability, gives me a free opportunity to experience 'basic or lower literacy').
I know that adding emoji characters helps them in the same way, so I use them frequently.
That's what acronyms were used for. Back in the day of AIM/ICQ I never felt I had issues expressing myself with just text. It was text supplemented with a healthy dose of emoticons and acronyms, which leads me to believe that emoji are redundant
What’s really interesting about emojis is that they can transcend even hard language barriers. An emoji used by an exclusive Japanese-speaker can be understood by an exclusive English-speaker. The range in expressivity for emojis obviously isn’t as great as a full language, but it’s surprisingly large and can grow without cognitive costs to users (unlike acronyms). Unlike acronyms, the audience size is effectively universal. So I 100% disagree with your claim that emojis are redundant.
Part of what is off-putting about emoji is that they make text look like early first-language reading materials, where pictures of objects are embedded next to the word you are meant to learn. It's kind of off-putting to read, at least for those of us who grew up in that experience.
I also do not share your adoration for things that are super instantly accessible. There is much value in learning, and in struggling along the path to learning, that people think they don't want or need. Linguistic training (like learning to read written words) is a necessary skill for assimilating oneself to a new culture or in-group and language is one of the best methods for practicing that.
Also, are emoji really so universally understood? Are the peach or eggplant really universally understood to stand in for genitalia? Like almost everything the simplest form of emoji are accessible but I do not think everyone in the world is on the same page about the finer points on how to use some symbols
At its core, language is a tool. Its job is to allow people to communicate ideas with other people. You're arguing that there's value in not making a tool easier to use because it promotes learning, but I disagree with that point. Sure, there's value in overcoming challenges to benefit learning, but we shouldn't create artificial challenges (like not using emojis) just for that benefit to learning by doing things in a harder way. It's like saying we should use hammers to put in screws because using a screwdriver makes things too easy. I agree that there's much value in learning, but I think learning can be done in a much more efficient and productive way than by refraining from using emojis.
Also, you have to think of the costs associated with the inefficiencies of human language. One example: look at all the scientific work being done in English. Anyone that doesn't speak English fluently is automatically at a massive disadvantage in the scientific field. These non-English speaking scientists have to spend years simply learning English to contribute their work. That's an opportunity cost. All those years could have been spent on their actual scientific work, and those individuals and society as a whole have to live with that loss. I'm obviously not arguing that emojis fix this problem, but I'm saying that simplifying our language tool in some way could.
> Also, are emoji really so universally understood? Are the peach or eggplant really universally understood to stand in for genitalia? Like almost everything the simplest form of emoji are accessible but I do not think everyone in the world is on the same page about the finer points on how to use some symbols
That's an interesting point. There are differences in how emojis are interpreted, but this is no different from written or spoken language. Since the beginning of human communication, people have developed slang words and altered the rules of language. Some of these changes have spread and persisted while others died out or remained in use within specific groups of people. While the peach and eggplant emoji may not have the same interpretations across age groups, different cultures can likely still infer their meaning. For example, the see/hear/say-no-evil monkey emojis likely transcend many cultural and language barriers. Knife + scream + shower head emojis likely convey the shower scene from Psycho to anyone who's seen the movie regardless of culture or language.
Emojis do as well. As someone who has autism, I don't recognize or understand facial expressions all the time. I remember being 18 years old and finally understand what faceroll/roll eyes meant (thanks to -what it was called then- an emoticon).
AIM/ICQ already had picture-smiley support, converting :) to a smiley. The first smileys on the internet were used in the start of 80's (they're apparently used in written form as well see [1]). It was used on IRC and e-mail.
Another fun fact of that time (80s) is that domain names and TLDs used to be written in CAPITAL LETTERS. And the first spam was from DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation).
Acronyms are very old (widely used), and useful, but that doesn't mean they're better because they're older or more used in the past. Remember that reading in past centuries wasn't for everyone, same for latin. Acronyms are language specific which emoticons/emoji are not. The acronym LOL, one of the first chat-specific acronyms, stems from IRC and is believed to be coming from Dutch (The Dutch word lol means "fun" or [non-sexual] "pleasure". The Dutch were one of the very first if not the first countries to connect to the USA internet, and same for its IRC presence.) If you're a native English speaker you may not give a rat about acronyms being English-centric, but for the rest of the world they often don't even know what the acronyms stand for or they have their local acronyms which you or me wouldn't grasp.
Emoticons and emojis do not suffer from that problem. Case in point, the red 100 emoji is widely popular in the USA (so I heard). People don't use it here in NL. But we understand what an American would mean with it.
I believe picture language (as I call it) plus on-the-fly translation devices (what Google Glass could've been ages ago but didn't work out due to public outcry) is going to solve communication in the 21st century. The effect of the tower of Babel shall be mitigated. Why are my glasses still dumb? All these brands being sold here, are ultimately owned by the same big fat multinational. There's a huge opportunity here.
How do you express that in ASCII emoticons?
It’s probably not a universal meaning but my point is that emojis can be used to express more than just basic emoticon ‘UNIVERSAL EXPRESSION OF HUMAN HAPPINESS’ style things.
This may or may not be an example of it -- for all I know it's a commonly used one with a well-established metaphoric meaning --, but I think emoji usage is strangely idiosyncratic.
That isn't an isolated instance of emoji confusion for me, either. Apart from the basic facial expression emoji, for me they're a great way of making a sentence more confusing.
We both rely on this one emoji to communicate more effectively: <smiling face with squinting eyes> [0]
We use others, but that one emoji makes all the difference in the world. Often we send only that single sign to each other.
[0] https://emojipedia.org/smiling-face-with-smiling-eyes/
EDIT: Replace emoji with text description and add citation.
And as a follow-on, do you think the animated and personalized versions of these emojis make it that much more effective?
For me, the text version communicates the same meaning and context, so it’s fascinating to see examples where the representational medium has a significant impact.
Text, and ASCII emoticons, just don't do that.
(and I'm guessing that after I see enough "we can save you money on your car insurance :smiling_face_with_smiling_eyes: manipulative overuse by marketing "humans", emojis won't do it anymore either).
(Although, do you genuinely think a photo of a cat being cute is emotionally the same and just as effective as a description of a cat being cute?)
I never understood people that spent money on digital goods until I found kakaotalk emojis.
for me there is no comparison. I adore their animated emojis and I'm willing to pay for them as do many others.
you can check them out.
I'd also guess that just because they feature it heavily on the keynote that a huge team spent the whole year only working on just Emojis. That doesn't mean that there weren't a lot of other teams doing important ground work and internal improvements that are not that easy to showcase on a keynote for a very diverse audience and press.
After all, even with social networks, we still haven't convinced everyone that the "at" username construct is a useful way to get people's attention online.
What if printed words were really just a transitional state of language until their purest form, emoji!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Egyptian_multiplicatio...
They augment; they do not replace.
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EDIT: I meant this as a genuine question, not as a "how could you possibly think this" response.