About 10 years ago, I believed that emojis were a scourge. I felt they were making people stupid and would atrophy our brains. I despised emojis.
Now… I use them all the time. I don’t believe in brains atrophying from such things anymore – just straight-up adapting to our new technological environments. And I’ve adapted to the use of emojis now, and I actually enjoy them.
No, I haven’t gone so far as to view The Emoji Movie – it looked liked “human slop” to me. (I assume that is the phrase many people would be comfortable with, since so many are accusing LLM agents of producing “AI slop.”) And I still haven’t taken the time to memorize any emoji codes outside of GitHub, where they are easy to remember (“:poop:”). But I kind of dig them now. One emoji is often worth at least four or five words. I wouldn’t necessarily write prompts with them, though. (Not yet, anyway. Something to try, perhaps? {would-insert-thinking-emoji-if-I-knew-how}).
I also like Dorling cartograms – there should be an emoji made for those, actually. So I thought… let’s go for it. Let’s ask Web Mapper to create a Dorling cartogram of emojis. The risky part? Which emoji for each country? Dangerous.
I wrote the prompt specifically to avoid any representation of skin color and to focus on agriculture, nature, and economic aspects. I uploaded one of the 40 map styles. And then… Web Mapper produced this.
Well done, Web Mapper. Well done. Thank you. {wish-I-could-insert-a-heart-emoji-here}
View Map HereWeb Mapper Prompt
Hi there,
Could you please do me a favor. I would like to create a World Emoji Day map in the style of a Dorling Cartogram. Each country should be represented by a unique emoji that is not particularly offensive. Determine which emoji to use based on current or historical political, economic, social, or ecological/agricultural stereotypes and norms for that country. (e.g., Guatemala may work represented as a Banana due to its high banana production, or a t-shirt because of its clothing manufacturers). Size the emojis based on the most comprehensive recent year of country population data found on Wikipedia.
You may use duplicate emoji styles as long as they are real and have different colors. NOTE however: no emoji representing human skin tone may be used more than once. All human skin tones should be default emoji yellow.