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Is there any significance to people using emojis that match their skin tone?
(lemmy.dbzer0.com)
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this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2024
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Yes, from the context it's crystal clear that they're white, they could be purple or green and they'd still be "white", but I think it's not relevant in a discussion about emojis.
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. Source: I wore them myself when I was a kid, and from your comment I'm guessing you weren't born yet.
And decades? The Simpsons started in 1989, while the first instant messengers already had smiley face emoticons in the mid 90s.
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.
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:
I guess they all watched too much Simpsons?
I believe emoji was a Japanese creation, not a Apple creation: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji