![]() Just as Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press hammered spelling and punctuation into conformity by sheer multiplicative force, so emoji act as a kind of straitjacket for language, smoothing out what we want to say by restricting what we can say. In most ways that count, then, emoji are a classic walled garden of the kind for which the internet is infamous - only rather than our favourite music being corralled into Spotify or YouTube Music, or our messages restricted to friends who happen to use Facebook or iMessage, it is our ideas that are moulded to fit the emoji that we’ve been given. Back in 2017, Apple modified its iOS software at China’s behest so that devices sold on mainland China would not display the Taiwanese flag emoji (□□) at the time of writing, ‘□□’ has disappeared from onscreen keyboards in Hong Kong, too. For a more egregious example, look no further than the protests against Chinese rule that currently rack Hong Kong. 12 These omissions had mundane technical explanations, but it is not difficult to imagine more sinister motives for suppressing such culturally significant symbols. From 2016 to 2019, for example, Samsung devices did not display the Latin cross (✝️) or the star and crescent (☪️). Nor is that the worst of it, because the companies that control the software that runs on our devices sometimes fail to let us use even those standard symbols. They are expressive, yes, but restrictive at the same time, constraining users to the standard set of emoji agreed by the Unicode Consortium and no more besides. (Image courtesy of Microsoft Deutschland.)įor all this joie d’emoji, it bears mentioning that, like the tech industry itself, emoji have never been exactly democratic. 10, 11 Microsoft’s Ergonomic Keyboard with emoji key, announced in October 2019. ![]() 9 And in October 2019, Microsoft went one better by releasing a brace of physical keyboards that allow the user to display an emoji palette with the tap of a dedicated emoji key. Since 2017, Apple’s high-end MacBook Pro laptops have incorporated a narrow touchscreen that displays an illuminated palette of emoji in compatible applications. In this way, emoji continue to shape how we interact not just with each other but also with our computers, tablets and smartphones - and they’re starting to physically shape those devices, too. 7 Dumb or not, Apple have since doubled down on the “weird animated emoji” front, last year launching a “memoji” feature that creates custom, emoji-style stickers based on the user’s facial appearance. 6 It sounds odd, and, well, it was within a day of the iPhone X’s unveiling, Devin Coldewey of TechCrunch opined that “Animoji are dumb and I detest them”. ![]() In 2017, the newly-launched iPhone X came with what Apple called “animoji” - animated, three-dimensional emoji with the ability to replicate the user’s facial expressions. 4, 5Īpple, as befits one of emoji’s earliest adopters in the West, have worked emoji especially hard. 2 * Also in 2015, Snapchat, an edgy messaging service popular with younger users, added emoji to indicate relationships beween users a year later, Facebook, a distinctly non-edgy social network, augmented its internet-ancient “like” button (□) with a palette of five additional “reaction” emoji (❤️, □, □, □ and □). Emojli, the emoji-only social network, may have folded back in 2015, 1 but that same year saw online payment company WorldPay muse that emoji might reasonably replace numbers when it came to PINs, reasoning that a combination of four distinct emoji makes for a significantly more secure password than four distinct digits. (As a software engineer by trade, I say that with the greatest respect.)Īs such, it should come as no surprise that emoji have been, and continue to be, darlings of the tech industry. They were born to inject life into Japan’s teen-friendly poke beru, or pagers later, they were adopted by Apple, Google, and other companies who have made their money online and, under the care of the Unicode Consortium, they continue to be tended to by a group of nerds of the highest order. But if we might be permitted for a moment to call them script- like, then, of all of the scripts and script-like things that we use to communicate online, emoji were perhaps the first to be native to the digital world. We saw in part 7 that emoji are neither a language nor a script. Given all we’ve seen so far in this series, it becomes natural to wonder: what’s next for emoji? And how do we even begin to answer that question? Start at PART 1, continue to PART 12 or view ALL POSTS in the series. This is the eleventh in a series of thirteen posts on Emoji (□).
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