News.com.au
Marilyn McMahon and Elizabeth Kirley
6 Dec 17
NEARLY everyone is familiar with emoji, those popular icons that appear in text messages, emails and social media platforms. Emoji are often used as lighthearted adjuncts to text, or to soften the blow of a message.
Emoji can be viewed as overly simplistic in some contexts. For example, government officials were questioned when Foreign Minister Julie Bishop conducted an interview using just emoji, and described Russian President Vladmir Putin using an angry face.
A 2017 study found that use of emoji in work emails reduced perceptions of competence.
But emoji can be taken very seriously in the context of the law. The use of emoji has challenged lawyers, judges, and lawmakers in several countries. In a legal context, emoji are increasingly recognised not as joke or ornament, but as a legitimate form of literacy.
Making a criminal threat via emoji:(more)
http://www.news.com.au/technology/online/social/how-the-law-responds-when-emoji-are-the-weapon-of-choice/news-story/04d9362f6bd5c27c61d6b5e1ab432798I found this article to be very, very, interesting. I had already heard about emoji becoming its own real language. But it never dawned on me to consider that in legal terms. Will we ever have emoji contracts, or emoji newspapers? Will there be emoji books? Who knows? It seems possible sometime in the future it may happen. And then the entire Earth will have one single common language.