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Episodes: 4
Time to listen: ~2 hrs
Featured Podcasts: 99% Invisible, Stuff You Should Know, a16z Podcast, Planet Money
Let’s get one thing out of the way first: this intro will include copious amounts of emojis. Typically, I do my best to avoid the icon-laden design aesthetic plaguing blogs and startup websites everywhere, but hey, it feels obligatory on this one 😎 .
In this pack, you’ll learn how we went from “I’m smiling” to :-) to 😄 , and why I believe the future of visual communication will leave everyone’s favorite yellow smileys in the dust.
The Past 📖
Once upon a time, digital communication looked something like this:
I know it looks basic, but, at the time, it was actually pretty tough to pull off!
You see, a letter represents little more than an abstract idea, and computers don’t do so well with abstract ideas. Even today, when you type out a message, your computer needs to convert numeric code into characters. With each keystroke, the computer receives a number, translates that number into a letter, and displays it on the screen.
This number/letter puzzle, in itself, wasn’t insurmountable for early software developers. The real problem was that people couldn’t agree on which numbers should stand for which letters. Imagine Steve in San Francisco decided an “A” should be represented by the code ‘1234’, while Melinda in Seattle picked ‘5678’. If Steve tried to send Melinda a message including an “A”, she’d be left with an error, or worse, a new word entirely.
Enter the Unicode Consortium, a group of secretive superheroes🦸 (read: linguistics nerds 🤓) formed to establish unique, standardized codes for every character in all of the world’s languages. From here on out, I’ll refer to them as the UC. With the UC’s standard in place, Steve and Melinda could communicate confidently with each other, and anyone around the world, knowing that whatever they sent would appear as intended.
So with that, the world of digital communication was saved forever, right? Wrong.
Linguists estimate that up to 70% of the meaning we derive from face-to-face encounters comes from non-verbal cues. Unsurprisingly, early internet users quickly moved beyond standard characters in an attempt to recreate some of these cues. In 1982, professors at Carnegie Melon issued a formal proposal to use :-) to signify a joke, and in 1997, Softbank released the first known emoji set. Other Japanese telcos quickly followed by developing their own unique characters.
Over the next decade, emoji gained mass adoption in Japan and began to spread across the globe as a new visual language. With each company maintaining its own encoding schema, however, the UC’s vision of linguistic interoperability fell into jeopardy once again.
In 2010, they officially recognized the first set of ~1k emojis, enabling big tech companies like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Twitter to equip their users with emojis without fear of characters failing to translate across operating systems.
The Present 🎁
Fast forward ten years and the UC have officially approved more than 3k emojis, embedding everything from 🍑 to 💩 into our cultural DNA.
What started as a small group of ragtag technolinguists now includes 9 voting members from companies like Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Google, and Netflix.
In episodes from 99% Invisible and Planet Money, you’ll learn exactly how this league of linguists decides which images to admit into the cultural lexicon, and how enterprising marketing teams have exploited this process along the way (did you really think Ford would rest until there was a pickup truck emoji?).
Today, there are two primary use cases for emoji:
Abbreviating or enhancing text-based communication (think TikTok comments surrounded by ✨ to convey sarcasm or pictograms of internet lingo like diamond hands/💎🤲 )
Capturing abstract emotion that can’t be conveyed via text (hellooo yellow smileys)
In the first case, the standardization guaranteed by the UC transforms text into cryptic visual memes. Thanks to consistent encoding, pictograms seeded in subreddits like Wallstreet bets can seamlessly transition to Twitter or TikTok to gain mass traction.
The second case represents the majority of emoji usage. 😂, 😭, ❤️, and 😍 alone account for a quarter of emojis on Twitter. This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. For nearly a decade, emojis were the easiest way to translate emotion through a screen.
The Future 🔮
Gen Z wields emoji to abbreviate/enhance text as fluidly as Aragorn wields a sword, and the use of emojis as pictograms will only gain popularity as a sort of new-fangled textual slang.
However, emojis will be replaced as the go-to means of quickly capturing abstract emotion. For proof, look no further than the iMessage keyboard in iOS14, which looks distinctly more colorful than it did a decade ago.
For the youth of yesteryear, emojis represented the only way to capture all-important nonverbal cues, but for the texters of today, photos, memojis, bitmojis, stickers, and gifs lay just a tap away. These alternatives offer a richer form of communication because they’re both more adaptive to the context of a given conversation and more representative of the person sending them.
Only the UC can create new emoji and they only do so once a year. Anyone can create a new gif, sticker, or Snapchat instantly. Open creation enables more contextually relevant visual communication, like a riff on a recent meme or inside joke.
The UC also designs emoji for mass appeal, limiting the potential for personalized self-expression. For years, emojis were limited to a single skin tone, leaving the majority of users with an inaccurate representation of themselves. With a biitmoji, memoji, or photo the sender determines self-representation.
Just look at all the ways I could instantly express the sentiment captured by the infamous "face with tears of joy”:
Am I really going to wait around for the UC to approve an emoji with a man bun when I can add flowing locks to my own avatar in seconds? Am I really going to send my friend a smiley when I know I could find a gif from our favorite TV show?
To go deeper on where emojis have been and where they’re headed, tune in to the pack!
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