Headline, January 21 2022/ STUDENTS : ''' '' JOY EMOJI JOT '' '''

STUDENTS : ''' '' JOY

 EMOJI JOT '' '''

WEB : CAMBODIA REIGNS THE CRAMPS. Cambodia's National Internet Gateway, scheduled to begin operating on Feb 16, will send the Internet traffic - including traffic from abroad - through a government-run portal.

The gateway, which will be mandatory for all service providers, will give state regulators the means to ''prevent and disconnect all network connections that affect national income, security, social order, morality, culture, traditions and customs.''

Government surveillance is already strict in Cambodia. Each ministry has a team that monitors the Internet. Offending content is reported to an internet crime unit in the Ministry of Interior, the center of the country's robust security apparatus.

Those responsible can be charged with incitement and sent to prison. But rights group say that the new law will make it even easier for the authorities to monitor online content and punish those who produce it, and that the recent arrests were meant to further intimidate citizens into self-censorship in a country where free speech is enshrined in the Constitution.

The National Internet Gateway is merely centralizing what has been a decentralized system of control over Cambodia's Internet,'' said Sophal Ear, a dean at the Thunderbird School of Global Management at Arizona State University whose family escaped the Khmer Rouge, the murderous regime that seized power in Cambodia in 1975.

''The outcome will be to crush what little remains of freedom of expression online.''

THERE was little change in the rankings of most used Emojis, a new study shows.

IN A HARD YEAR - WE NEEDED the tears of joy emoji a lot. Its popularity has persisted even though it's scorned by some members of Gen. Z.

The pandemic has affected nearly all aspects of modern life : the clothes we wear, the food we eat and how we spend our time. One thing, however, has remained almost unchanged : the emojis we send.

According to data from the Unicode Consortium, the organization that maintained the standards for digital text, none of the 10 most used emojis from 2019 [ which was the last time it released data ] also ranked among the top 10 this year.

The red heart emoji held the No.2 spot, and the tears of joy emoji ranked No1, even though members of Gen Z find it uncool.

To the people who create and study emojis, the continued use of tears of joy, also known as the laughing-crying emoji came as no surprise.

''It speaks to how many people use emoji. If emoji were a purely Gen Z thing, then you wouldn't see it so highly ranked,'' said Alexander Robertson, an emoji researcher at Google.

''Because of the sheer number of people using emoji, even if one group thinks something is lame, they have to be a really big group to affect those statistics.''

And it makes sense that Gen Z would think that that certain emojis aren't hip, said Jennifer Daniel, an emoji subcommittee head for Unicode and a creative director at Google.

It's part of the ''teenage experience of creating a sense of subculture where there's a right way and a wrong way of behaving.''

Ms. Daniel also noted, that emojis express a ''spectrum'' of laughter : '' There's light chuckling. There's acknowledgement laughter, which is just a marker for empathy.'' Using emojis, such as the skull face [ '' I am dead '' ] or crying face [uncontrollable tears of laughter], can illustrate that range.

Looking at singular platform, however, might tell a slightly different story. According to data obtained from Twitter, tears of joy was the most tweeted emoji in 2020, but got dumped down to No. 2 this year, with the crying face taking its place. Use of tears of joy declined 23 percent in 2020 to 2021.

But the consistency of most of the top 10 in Unicode's data set, which covers multiple platforms and app, also signifies just how flexible the current set of emojis is.

''It basically indicates that we have what we need to communicate a broad range of expression, or even very specific concepts,'' Ms. Daniel said.

''You don't necessarily need a Covid emoji or a vaccination emoji because you have you have biceps, syringe, Band-Aid, which conveys semantically the same thing.''

Ms. Daniel added that at the start of the pandemic, people used the microbe, or virus, emoji and the crown emoji to refer to Covid [in Spanish, ''corona'' translates to ''crown''].

The syringe emoji jumped to 193rd place this year in terms of overall use, compared with 282nd in 2019.

Although the past two years have been like none before in emoji history, the emotions we expressed through emoji while living through them were largely familiar.

''We did see a rise in the use of virus emoji, but not in a way that even made it remotely into the most commonly used emojis, because we still had plenty to laugh about and plenty to cry about,'' said Lauren Gawne, a co-host of the podcast ''Lingthusiasm'' and senior lecturer at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia.

''Even in the midst of this massive global pandemic that preoccupied so much of our time,'' she added, ''we still spent a lot of time wishing each other happy birthday or checking in or laughing about some new and unexpected element of this slow-burning weirdness.''

The Honor and Serving of the Latest Global Operational Research on Emojis and Times, continues. The World Students Society thanks authors Anna P. Kambhampaty and Charles Mcdermid.

With most respectful dedication to the Students, Professors and Teachers of Cambodia and then the world. See Ya all prepare and register for Great Global Elections on The World Students Society :    wssciw.blogspot.com and Twitter - !E-WOW! - The Ecosystem 2011 :

Good Night and God Bless

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