This has gone mostly unremarked, and it is a serious thing that is becoming more and more useful. Recall it is all about an assemblage of abstractions that we have all agreed upon and thus can use to transmit information, particularly in regards to emotional content and context.
All that which happens face to face automatically has to be created here and it is working and evolving.
With over 700 accepted symbols we are at the point in which we need to contrive a learning cycle to bring folks quickly up to speed.
It is going to become even more interesting when we use holograms more.
.
Smile, You’re Speaking Emoji: The Rapid Evolution of a Wordless Tongue
The rapid evolution of a wordless tongue.
Consider the tilde. There it is, that little
squiggle, hanging out on the far-upper-left-hand side of your computer
keyboard. The symbol dates back to ancient Greece, though tilde
comes from Spanish, and in modern English it’s used to indicate
“approximately” (e.g., ~30 years) or “equivalence” (x ~ y) in
mathematics. And, as of this year, according to a breakdown
of the website emojitracker by Luminoso, a text-analytics company, the
tilde was surpassed in usage on Twitter by the emoji symbol for “joy.”
Which looks like this:
.
The Joy emoji—also referred to on the Emojipedia website
as “Face With Tears of Joy” or “the LOL Emoji” (emoji don’t have
official names, just nicknames created by their users)—dates back, in
North America, to roughly 2011, when Apple put a readily accessible
emoji keyboard in iOS 5 for the iPhone. Which means that in three short
years, Face With Tears of Joy vanquished the 3,000-year-old tilde.
And that’s just one emoji. If we count all emoji together—Smiling Face
and Smiling Face With Smiling Eyesand Grinning Faceand Winking Face
and Smiling Face With Heart-Shaped Eyes
and Kissing Faceand Kissing Face With Closed Eyes
and Face With Stuck-Out Tongue With Tightly Closed Eyes
, not to mention House With Garden
and Convenience Store
and Tram
and Love Hotel
and Ghost
and Money With Wings
and Chart With Upward Trend
and Hamburger
—then emoji, as a group, are now used more frequently on Twitter than are hyphens or the numeral 5.
All of which is to say: The 3,000-year-old tilde might want to
consider rebranding itself as Invisible Man With Twirled Mustache.
It’s easy to dismiss emoji. They are, at first glance,
ridiculous. They are a small invasive cartoon army of faces and vehicles
and flags and food and symbols trying to topple the millennia-long
reign of words. Emoji are intended to illustrate, or in some cases
replace altogether, the words we send each other digitally, whether in a
text message, email, or tweet. Taken together, emoji look like the
electronic equivalent of those puffy stickers tweens used to ornament
their Trapper Keepers.
And yet, if you have a smartphone, emoji are now available to you as
an optional written language, just like any global language, such as
Arabic and Catalan and Cherokee and Tamil and Tibetan and English.
You’ll find an emoji keyboard on your iPhone, nestled right between
Dutch and Estonian. The current set is limited to 722 symbols—these are
the ones that have been officially encoded into Unicode, which is an
international programming standard that allows one operating system to
recognize text from another. (Basically, Unicode is the reason that the
text message you send from your iPhone is legible to someone with an
Android phone and vice versa.) This summer, the Unicode Consortium—a U.S.-based nonprofit organization with a Pynchonian name that rules over all things Unicode—announced that more than 250 new emoji symbols
would be added to the existing set. These new emoji range from
obviously useful ones like Cloud With Rain and Dark Sunglasses to
questionably useful ones like Reversed Hand With Middle Finger Extended
to frankly bizarre ones like Man in Business Suit Levitating
. And this fall, in response to ongoing concerns
about the lack of ethnic diversity among existing emoji—most of which,
if they involve human faces, are represented as vaguely Caucasian—Unicode announced that users should soon have the option to change the skin tone of certain emoji to different hues on the FitzPatrick scale, a “recognized standard for dermatology.”
This was very big news to emoji enthusiasts. It should be pretty big
news for you, as well. We are all increasingly talking to each other
through screens. A 2010 Pew report
showed that teenagers text each other more frequently than they use any
other form of communication, including face-to-face conversation, which
comes in at No. 3. If you ask a random person, especially one under 30,
what a tilde is, he will probably stare at you blankly. But he is very
likely to recognize, and comprehend, Face With Tears of Joy.
In 2013, in response to the question “Do you use stickers or emoji in message apps?” 74 percent of people in the U.S. and 82 percent in China responded that they have. (Stickers are a kind of faux emoji—things like Seinfeld
Emoji or the “Peanuts” characters you find on Facebook—that you can
send using certain apps but that aren’t baked into Unicode.) Over 470
million Joy emoji are being sent back and forth on Twitter right
now—which makes the Joy emoji the No. 1 most popular emoji on Twitter
(it tends to compete for the top spot with the Heart). Lovers have
successfully wooed one another with emoji. Recruiters for ISIS are using emoji in their friendly sounding, ISIS-promoting tweets. Someone put together a song-length emoji-translation video of Beyoncé’s “Drunk in Love,” while someone else translated R. Kelly’s “Trapped in the Closet” into emoji, while someone else translated all of Moby-Dick (titled, inevitably, Emoji Dick). There are no fewer than three emoji-only social networks currently in development: Emojicate, Emoji.li, and something called Steven. The website Emojinalysis will track your recent emoji use to analyze your emotional well-being. The rapper Drake recently got an honest-to-God tattoo of an emoji that, depending on whom you ask, means either “praying hands” or “high five”
. (Drake says praying hands. “I pity the fool who high-fives in 2014,” he clarified via Instagram.)
This elasticity of meaning is a large part of the appeal and,
perhaps, the genius of emoji. They have proved to be well suited to the
kind of emotional heavy lifting for which written language is often
clumsy or awkward or problematic, especially when it’s relayed on tiny
screens, tapped out in real time, using our thumbs. These seemingly
infantile cartoons are instantly recognizable, which makes them
understandable even across linguistic barriers. Yet the implications of
emoji—their secret meanings—are constantly in flux.
Decoding pictures as part of communication has been at the root of
written language since there was such a thing as written language. “What
is virtually certain,” writes Andrew Robinson in Writing and Script: A Very Short Introduction,
is “that the first written symbols began life as pictures.”
Pictograms—i.e., pictures of actual things, like a drawing of the
sun—were the very first elements of written communication, found in
Mesopotamia, Egypt, and China. From pictograms, which are literal
representations, we moved to logograms, which are symbols that stand in
for a word ($, for example) and ideograms, which are pictures or symbols
that represent an idea or abstract concept. Modern examples of
ideograms include the person-in-a-wheelchair symbol that universally
communicates accessibility and the red-hand symbol at a pedestrian
crossing that signals not “red hand” but “stop.”
Emoji can somewhat magically function as pictograms and ideograms at
the same time. The most straightforward example is the Eggplant emoji.
On one level, it looks like an eggplant and can be used to communicate
“eggplant.” On another level, it looks (kind of) like a penis and can be
used to communicate all manner of lascivious intent, especially when
combined with a peach.
As Jenna Wortham, a New York Times technology reporter, wrote in an essay about emoji for Womanzine’s
emoji issue, they “have become an ever-evolving cryptographic language
that changes depending on who we are talking to, and when.” In short,
emoji are a secret code language made up of symbols that everyone
already intuitively understands.
“When it comes to text-based communication, we’re babies,” explains
Tyler Schnoebelen, a linguistics Ph.D. from Stanford who works for
Idibon, a text-analytics company. As he says, we’ve learned to talk, and
we’ve learned to write, but we’re only now learning to write at the
speed of talking (i.e., text), sending messages over vast expanses,
absent any physical contextual clues. If you are talking to someone
face-to-face, you don’t need an additional word or symbol to express
“I’m smiling” because you would, presumably, be smiling. The
psychologist Albert Mehrabian, in an oft-cited (and occasionally
criticized) study, determined in the 1950s that only 7 percent of
communication is verbal (what we say), while 38 percent is vocal (how we
say it) and 55 percent is nonverbal (what we do and how we look while
we’re saying it). This is well and good for face-to-face communication,
but when we’re texting, 93 percent of our communicative tools are
negated.
Enter emoji.
an ancient stallion’s journey
an ancient stallion’s journey
Emoji were born in a true eureka moment, from
the mind of a single man: Shigetaka Kurita, an employee at the Japanese
telecom company NTT Docomo. Back in the late 1990s, the company was
looking for a way to distinguish its pager service from its competitors
in a very tight market. Kurita hit on the idea of adding simplistic
cartoon images to its messaging functions as a way to appeal to teens.
The first round of what came to be called emoji—a Japanese neologism
that means, more or less, “picture word”—were designed by Kurita, using a
pencil and paper, as drawings on a 12-by-12-pixel grid and were
inspired by pictorial Japanese sources, like manga (Japanese comic
books) and kanji (Japanese characters borrowed from written Chinese).
Kurita wound up with 176 crude symbols ranging from smiley faces to
music notes. This feature proved so popular that the other Japanese
telecoms adopted it. In 2007, Apple released the first iPhone—and the
global smartphone market boomed. Apple and Google both realized that, in
order to crack the Japanese market, they would need to provide emoji
functions in their operating systems, if only for use in Japan. So Apple
buried an emoji keyboard in the iPhone where North Americans weren’t
intended to find it. But eventually tech-savvy users in the U.S., who
were curious about the Japanese emoji phenomenon, figured out that you
could force your phone to open this hidden keyboard by downloading a
Japanese-language app, and voilà—suddenly you could bejangle your texts
with a smiling Pile of Poo.
There are a handful of truly confusing emoji to the North American
eye, nearly all of which can be traced to some Japanese custom or
tradition. For example, in Japan, a pile of poo is considered good luck.
Here’s an explanation from the Japan Times to a reader from
Redmond, Washington, who wrote in after being befuddled by the abundance
of golden poo charms available for sale at the Narita airport: “The
product you saw is called Kin no Unko (The Golden Poo), a name that
plays on the fact that the Japanese word for poop (unko) starts with the
same ‘oon’ sound as a completely unrelated word that means ‘luck.’
Japanese enjoy this kind of pun—traditional storytelling is full of
them—which may help explain why more than 2.5 million of the lucky
little loads have sold in the last seven years.” (The article continues:
“Furthermore, there is a long history of poo-related worship in Japan
…”)
“But why is the pile of poo smiling?” would be the next logical
question. Before we answer that, you may want to buckle yourself in,
because we’re about to toboggan down the Smiling Pile of Poo Emoji
Wormhole.
Every smartphone operating system—Apple, Android,
etc.—has its own rendering of each emoji, including poo. Android’s pile
of poo is surrounded by flies and wavy lines that suggest a poo-like
stinkiness
. Apple’s pile of poo has wide eyes and is
smiling. Twitter’s pile of poo also has eyes but looks kind of
surprised, perhaps because it’s only just realized that it’s a sentient
pile of poo with eyes
. So if your pile of poo is smiling, it’s likely
because you have an iPhone, and someone at Apple thought it’d be fun to
make the poo happy.
The programmers behind each operating system are free to design their
emoji as they like. However, the emoji palette—the collection of 722
standardized emoji that are available for you to use—has been encoded by
the Unicode Consortium, which was founded in 1990 and consists of a
loose network of contributing members. The people who do work for
Unicode tend to be computer-programming experts with a side interest in
linguistics—a typical biography: “His hobbies include Maltese-language
advocacy.” They are, in a way, the modern analog to the devout monks
who sat and diligently created illuminated manuscripts so that great
written works of theology could be widely shared.
spoiler alert! --
nobody puts
baby in the corner --
the plot of scandal --
the kardashian family --
Emoji presented a new and unique dilemma to
Unicode. “With most text, you don’t have things being invented left,
right, and center,” says Peter Constable, the vice-president of Unicode.
“The letters of English are the letters of English. We don’t have
people inventing new letters of English every day.”
With emoji, however,
there are limitless possibilities for new symbols, and it’s literally
impossible to meet the demand. And so, despite the fact that, as of
2011, you could text a cartoon pile of poo to any person in the world,
people in the world were not happy. The world wanted an emoji hot dog!
And an emoji avocado! And, understandably, representations of people of
color! But in order to add new emoji, Unicode would have to invent them,
then design them, then approve them, and then encode them. And Unicode
is not in the business of inventing or designing new emoji, anymore than
it would invent and design new English letters and add them to the
alphabet.
Unicode did decide, however, to encode the 250 new emoji to be
released this summer, which should show up on your phone as soon as
Apple, Google, Microsoft, and other Unicode signatories add them to
their operating systems. (Apple’s iOS 8, for example, does not have the
latest emoji, and the company has declined to comment on when they might
go live.) None of these “new” emoji are actually new—instead, the new
emoji are all either translations of preexisting font sets known as
Wingdings and Webdings, or they are fairly boring new symbols, like the
ever-useful Increase Font Size Symbol.
There
are, though, a few notable additions, such as that Man in Business Suit
Levitating (also referred to as Jumping emoji or Hovering emoji), which
is an excellent example of how the technologically convoluted path for
new emoji leads to the existence of totally weird and random characters.
The Wingdings font was originally developed way back in 1990 by
Microsoft as a way of allowing computer users to incorporate symbols
into their text, including such sexy icons as an open folder
and a mailbox
. A subsequent font, Webdings, was created in 1997
to allow a similar use of symbols online. In Webdings, an unusual
symbol was included. It is, for lack of a better description, a man in a
business suit levitating.
Internet sleuths, puzzled as to why Microsoft had decided to include
this particular inexplicable symbol, tracked down one of the original
Webdings designers, who explained that the symbol—which replaces the
lowercase m—was intended as a tribute to the “rude boy” logo for 2
Tone Records, a ska record label founded by one of the guys from the
Specials. Now, at least as far as your Unicode-reading smartphone is
concerned, Man in Business Suit Levitating is as legitimate a character
as the numeral 5, or the letter A, or the tilde, or poo. What
that man will mean—well, that’s entirely up to you. This is the fun of
emoji. The nail-painting emoji
, in some circles, has come to mean “I’m not
bothered” or “Haters gonna hate.” Man in Business Suit Levitating could
mean “jumping for joy,” or it could mean “mystery.” (Online speculators
have already nicknamed it “the Man in Black emoji.”) As Wortham explains
about her favorite emoji, the Tempura Shrimp
, what she loves about it is precisely the fact
that it can have many different meanings. Sometimes she uses it to mean a
foul or “salty” mood, when she wants to curl up like a shrimp. With
some of her friends, the shrimp morphed into a joke that stands in for
“Mariah Carey.” (“Something about her complexion and the way she’s
always stuffed into a tube-ish dress,” Wortham writes in her shrimp
essay.) Others use the shrimp as “quirky filler”—a nod, a wink, an
acknowledgment that you’re simply thinking of someone. Tempura Shrimp
emoji, she writes, has become “a way to be present when there’s nothing
else to say at all.”
Consider the exclamation point. For much of its history,
the exclamation point had a fairly simple usage: to straightforwardly
and sincerely indicate excitement or, if included in a quotation,
vehemence or volume. (“Get off my lawn!” as opposed to “Get off my
lawn.”) Yet for a long time, circa the mid-1990s, it seemed
linguistically and socially impossible to use an exclamation point
unironically. I’ll anchor this observation to Peter Bagge’s landmark
grunge-culture comic Hate!, which debuted in 1990, simply titled Hate,
but which added the telltale exclamation point to its name at issue No.
16 in 1994. I’ll also add, from personal recollection, that if you
included an exclamatory phrase such as “I’m so excited!” or “See you
tonight!” in any written electronic correspondence up to, say, 1999, you
could reliably assume it would be read as the punctuational equivalent
of a smirk.
“Emoji are a small invasive cartoon army of 722 pictographs, trying to topple the 5000 year long reign of written words.” --
“Emoji is like someone invented a secret code language that everyone already intuitively understands.” --
That was how my generation came to use the
exclamation point, anyway. More recently, with the advent of new forms
such as tweets and text messaging, the exclamation point has reverted to
something closer to its original meaning. In fact, it’s more or less
switched places with the period, so that “I’m excited to see you!” now
conveys sincere excitement to see you, while “I’m excited to see you.”
seems, on a screen at least, to imply the opposite. The exclamation
point, once so sprightly and forceful, has come, according to Ben Yagoda
in a piece in the New York Times, to signify “minimally acceptable enthusiasm.”
All this fluidity means that it’s very hard to keep up—it’s what the
writer Emily Gould described to a friend as the “arms race of
communication styling that led me to feel that sometimes only one
exclamation point seems unenthusiastic or even downright sarcastic.” She
was, in part, explaining her attraction to emoji—which, she wrote,
“make it easier to talk about anything, I think!”
Her friend Phoebe Connelly had texted her about engagement rings—a
fraught subject. Connelly often addressed her engagement using emoji:
the Heart
, the Diamond
, the Diamond Ring
, the Wedding Cake
, the Party Starters
. (Weirdly, though, not the Bride With Veil
, the most obviously wedding-related emoji, which
she avoided for reasons she can’t quite explain, even to herself.)
“Emoji,” Connelly wrote in an article for the Womanzine
special emoji issue, “allow me an ironic space within the dreaded
cheery sincerity of being engaged. I can emoji diamond rings; therefore,
it is ok that yes, I have a diamond ring. I default to emoji, a safe
argot, as a means of discussing a marriage I’m emotionally ready for,
but still lack the language to describe.”
When I first encountered emoji, I assumed they were used only
ironically—perhaps because, as a member of Generation X, I am accustomed
to irony as a default communicative mode. And it’s certainly true that
emoji have proved popular, unsurprisingly, with early adopters and
techno-fetishists and people with trend-sensitive antennae—the kinds of
people who might, for example, download a Japanese app to “force” their
iPhone to reveal a hidden emoji keyboard. But emoji have also proved to
be popular with the least techno-literate and ironic among us, i.e.,
our parents. Many people I spoke to relayed that their moms were the
most enthusiastic adopters of emoji they knew. One woman said that her
near-daily text-message-based interaction with her mother consists
almost entirely of strings of emoji hearts. Another woman, with a
septuagenarian mother, revealed to me that her mom had recently sent a
text relaying regret, followed by a crying-face emoji—and that this was
possibly the most straightforwardly emotional sentiment her mother had
ever expressed to her.
And now we’re getting to the heart of what emoji do well—what perhaps
they do better even than language itself, at least in the
rough-and-tumble world online. Aside from the widespread difficulty of
expressing yourself in real time with your clumsy thumbs, while hunched
over a lit screen, and probably distracted by 50 other things, there’s
the fact that the internet is mean. The widespread anonymity of the web
has marked its nascent years with a kind of insidious incivility that we
all now accept with resignation. Comment sections are a write-off.
“Troll” is a new and unwelcome subspecies of person. Twitter’s a
hashtag-strewn battlefield.
But emoji are not, it turns out, well designed to convey meanness.
They are cartoons, first of all. And the emoji that exist—while very
useful for conveying excitement, happiness, bemusement, befuddlement,
and even love—are not very good at conveying anger, derision, or hate.
If we can take as a given that millennials, as a generation, were raised
in a digital environment—navigating, for the first time, digital
relationships as an equally legitimate and in some ways dominant form of
interpersonal interaction—it stands to reason they might be drawn to a
communicative tool that serves as an antidote to ambient incivility.
They might be especially receptive to, and even excited about, a tool
that counteracts the harshness of life in the online world. They might
be taken with emoji.
The word that came up multiple times, in many conversations, with many people about emoji was soften.
“The thing it does is soften things,” says Tyler Schnoebelen, the linguistics expert.
“I use emoji in personal emails all the time, because I feel like I’m
softening the email,” says Vulture’s Lindsey Weber, who co-curated the “Emoji” art show.
Alice Robb, who is in her 20s, wrote in The New Republic
about saying good-bye to a friend who was moving across the country via
text message. “I texted her an emoji of a crying face. She replied with
an image of a chick with its arms outstretched. This exchange might
have been heartfelt. It could have been ironic. I’m still not really
sure. It’s possible that this friend and I are particularly emotionally
stunted, but I put at least part of the blame on emoji: They allowed us
to communicate without saying anything, saving us from spelling out any
actual sentiments.” And yet what’s striking is that her whole story is
full of actual sentiment—she is no doubt sad that her friend is leaving,
and her friend is no doubt sad to be leaving. Adding an emoji to a
message doesn’t undercut those sentiments (as irony would) but rather
says, “I mean this, but it’s hard to say it, and I know it’s hard, but
that makes it no less true.” Emoji’s default implication isn’t irony;
its default is sincerity, but sincerity that’s self-aware. If the ironic
exclamation point was the signature punctuational flourish of
Generation X, the emoji—that attempt to bridge the difficult gap between
what we feel and what we intend and what we say and what we text—is the
signature punctuational flourish of the millennials.
“There really are no negative or mean emoji,” says Weber. “There’s no
violent or aggressive emoji. Even the angry faces are hilarious or
silly.” Sure, there’s a pistol emoji. But imagine sending a death threat
using Pistol and Angry Face
. If it’s possible to “soften” a death threat, emoji would do it.
It’s frankly pretty strange that, in an online climate that is
constantly being called out for excessive aggression and maliciousness,
emoji have no in-built linguistic capacity for meanness. There are angry
faces and frowning faces and thumbs down and even the so-called Face
With No Good Gesture, which, in the Apple set, is a woman with her arms
crossed in an X. But, seriously, look at her:
. The Face With No Good Gesture has never actually
hurt someone’s feelings. One of the many new official emoji being added
as part of Unicode 7 is a raised middle finger—like all the new emoji,
it’s simply being added because it’s part of the Wingdings font. At
first glance, it seems pretty surly, especially for an emoji. But as an
expression of aggression, it’s harmless. If the worst that online trolls
could do was send you an endless string of raised-middle-finger emoji, I
think we’d all agree that we’d be living in a better world.
Consider the Smiling Face With Smiling Eyes. Right now,
on Twitter, Smile is being used 157,439,872 times. Popularity-wise, that
ranks it as No. 8. Here are a few other popular ones: Face Savoring
Delicious Food
. Disappointed but Relieved
. Man and Woman Holding Hands
. Baby
. Face Throwing a Kiss. Person Raising Both Hands in Celebration
. Okay Hand Sign
. Thumbs Up
.
In 1974, the American Institute of Graphic Arts, in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Transportation, designed a new system of symbols to be used in airports around the world in response to the increase in global trave
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