The heart empty codes are meaningless

Shortly after WIRED Editor -in -Chief started in 2023, I sent me a message about Slack. By chance, I turned it. A message from my very serious and new managers. It chases me to this day.

I have no remembrance of what the message said, just a heart shaped shaped. When I realized my fault after several hours of action, I felt panic. Do I remove it? Make a joke? I left my job? In the end, I switched it with 👍 at some time after working hours and I prayed that it wouldn’t record anything exactly of this.

The reason for my mistake is that ❤ has become a reaction to the recession, which displays the most used emojis when you hover on a comment. This means that hearing my manager was part of a bigger problem: I was hearing messages from colleagues all the time. The more you look, the more you realize that this was happening everywhere. Of course, of course, but also in individual texts, collective chats-anywhere I can interact with ❤, I would like it.

Not only me. One of the literal war correspondents on the front lines in Ukraine hears my signal, saying that I will return to the stadium. Chat my main friends group mired in heart messages of all kinds. Of course, my wife and I constantly turned my wife, to the extent that the failure to do so has become a hidden hint until one of us is busy or eccentric. It is clear that Emoji in the heart has become a virtual way to communicate skillfully with each other. The question is to communicate what? Its meaning appears to turn with the context to the point that it no longer has a fixed meaning at all – except when using it wrongly.

Neil Cohen, the cognitive scientist who focuses on visual communication and associate professor at the University of Telberg in the Netherlands, tells Wire in an email that it is necessary to understand the context – and therefore, it means expressive heart symbols before using it.

“Otherwise, you are facing a problem if you send a wrongd person a red heart instead of a white heart!” Cohen says. “This has become a serious problem, given this Judicial cases Even sending whether sending expressive symbols to co -workers is sexual harassment. “

Yixes.

In general, the heart shape was used as a symbol for hundreds of years, and it has also turned over time. A Prominent “So he was associated with sex, and only after Christians, did it become linked to love,” says Cohen.

These Christians took the idea of ​​the sacred heart and went to thousands of years, as they generalized the heart as a symbol of love in Western culture to the point that it now evokes distinctive chocolate and strange chocolate than Jesus Christ’s crucifixion.

Hearts were among the first unicod symbols created on the Internet in the early 1990s to achieve Later on, expressive symbols have become todayand According to Emojipedia. It was released “❤” at first, it was released as part of the Unicode 1.1 in 1993, initially in the name of his predecessor before the color, “Heavy Black Heart”. By 2014, he was cited ❤ The most popular “word” in the world. It is now almost virtual emoji anywhere you can write – this is where problems come.