Immediately after Wired's global editor began in 2023, she sent me a message on Slack. Incidentally, I was heartbroken. A message from the boss is very serious, very new. It haunts me to this day.
I have no memory of what the message says, only a shame, heart shape. When I realized my fault a few hours after the certificate, I panicked. Did I eliminate it? Do a joke? Escape from my work? In the end, I swap it for a while after work and pray that she would register exactly nothing of these.
The reason for my mistake is because ❤ has become a reaction on Slack, displaying emoticons most used most when you hover through a comment. That means, my boss's message is part of a bigger problem: I always have messages from my colleagues. The more I look, the more I realize this is happening everywhere. Of course, Slack, but also in a one -on -one text, group conversations everywhere I can react to one, I will do.
That is not me. A literal war correspondent on the battle line in Ukraine believed that my signal message said I would return to him on a yard. Chat of my main friends is filled with heart messages of all types. Of course, my wife and I kept talking to each other, to the point of not doing so has become a subtle suggestion that one of us is very busy or irritable. The emotional symbol of the heart has clearly become a default way to communicate subtly with each other. The question is, what to communicate? Its meaning seemed to turn the context that it no longer had a fixed significance on all exceptions when you use it wrong.
Neil Cohn, a cognitive scientist focusing on visual communication and is an associate professor at the University of Tilburg in the Netherlands, telling Wired in an email that it is essential to understand the context and thus, meaning is a heart emotion before you use it.
If not, you will have trouble if you send the wrong person a red heart instead of a white heart! Cohn said. “This has become a serious problem, for that case Even has accessed whether the emotional icon to colleagues constitutes sexual harassment or not.
Yike.
Broadly, the heart shape has been used as a symbol for hundreds of years, and it has also changed over time. “ONE outstanding theory A silhi seed from Africa in ancient times shaped like a heart and used as a sex stimulant, according to Mr. Co Co Co. Therefore, it was associated with sex, and only later, through Christians, it became associated with love.
Those Christians have taken the idea of the sacred and wild heart in many millennia, disseminating the heart as a symbol of admiration in Western culture that it now evokes imprints and chocolate. Worse is the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.
The heart is one of the first Unicode icons created in the internet in the early 1990s will Then become the emotional icon of todayThen According to the emotional icon. Released as part of Unicode 1.1 in 1993, initially shared the name of its predecessor before its color, Heart Heavy Black Heart. In 2014, it was quoted as “The word” is the most popular in the world. Now it is a default emoticon that is almost anywhere you can type and that is where the problems occur.