I sometimes find it difficult to comprehend the mentalities of people I share this planet with. This story on the BBC does little to change that.
It seems that some British firm has come up with a system whereby your PIN code(s) – that you use for your bank, etc. – can be set using emojis.
For anyone who doesn’t know, an emoji can simultaneously be any or all of the following:
- a simple icon used to convey several words at once
- a confusing icon of incomprehensible meaning outside Japan (and probably, even inside)
- a way of extracting money from people who aren’t good with words, but who still have a smartphone
Quite frankly, anyone who uses emojis is not likely to be old enough to have a bank account (or if they do, they shouldn’t have). It’s bad enough when people intersperse forum posts or text messages with “lol” as a substitute for a full stop, or insist on typing “u” instead of “you”. At best, it’s just lazy. At its worst, it’s pathetic. But emoticons – or emojis, as they have evolved into – are a hundred times worse.
No one with a mental age above 15 is going to use them. They have their roots in Japanese culture anyway, and as you can see from the brief selection in the image at the top of this article, they are pretty much meaningless if you’re not a Japanese school kid. But even then, who the hell is going to need to use a small picture of a mouse or a puppy in anything other than the most pointless of communications? And what’s the difference between a yellow heart and red one? Jaundice, maybe? Yet people actually pay money for these damned things, even though in a more basically drawn form they’re already part of the Unicode standard (and that’s free).
Laughably, Androidcentral says:
With emoji, users could communicate using few or little words and still have their passion come through. One such example would be the “Reversed Hand with Middle Finger Extended” emoji that allows you to quickly express your emotion without having to say much.
Like I suggested above, anyone who needs to say that very often has a restricted mental age.
Anyway, the “service” being touted in that original article has 44 symbols, and it reckons that that’s better than just the 10 numbers used for bank PINs. Your first thought is why they couldn’t use the letters of the alphabet and punctuation marks as well as the numeric characters, but this is where the dumbing down comes in:
David Webber, managing director of Intelligent Environments, said the system was designed to appeal to 15-25-year-olds.
“Why can’t financial service be fun and innovative?” he said.
The truth of the matter is that said 15-25 year olds really should be encouraged to learn to communicate properly, because once they get to 26+ pathetic cutesy icons aren’t going to cut it any more.
Mind you, the frightening thing is that with companies like Intelligent Environments around, maybe in 10 years’ time we’ll be living in a techno village of the damned, where people can only communicate like this. God help us.
As a footnote to this, the day after I updated it I was in contact with a pupil who has a her test coming up. She wanted an extra lesson somewhere, but my diary was full. However, I got a cancellation on the morning of her test and asked her if she wanted it. After confirming she did, and after me querying her choice of time and the fact she has the attention span of a gnat, she sent me this text message:
I can’t work out if the emoji adds any value to the text or not.