Korea’s Racially Progressive Instant Messenger, KaKaoTalk?

KakaoTalk’s Racially Progressive Sticker Character called “Black”

For those people who use Apple iOS/iphones and are also texters, the selection of Apple emojis is one filled with characters and faces that on the whole are pretty much devoid of ethnic considerations. For instance, take this quote from Dailydot:

“If these Emoji are going to be the texting and Twitter standard, we think it’d be cool if they better reflected the diversity of the people using them,” argues a petition currently up on DoSomething.org…”

The world of stickers and emoticons and emoji is a serious one. Not to be taken lightly, as I have written before, some apps, such as NHN Japan’s LINE, have made as much as $17 million dollars in revenue through its sticker-funding model. If Apple ever seriously wants to get into what could be a very lucrative messaging business someday, this is an issue it will have to tackle.

In the meantime, South Korean chat app maker KakaoTalk appears to be leading the way by including what could be the very 1st dark-skinned sticker in a chat-app downloaded more than 10 million times. If you’re a company that wants to give off a positive impression about a sticker-character with darker skin, “Black” from KakoTalk’s line up seems to me to be a great start. True, there’s a cheesy sort of comical focus on Black’s yellow afro. But once you get past that, the socioeconomic implications of Black’s character become apparent: He’s the only one among the lineup of lighter-skinned toned KakaoTalk friends who most often appears to be wearing a business suit, and sometimes there are depictions of him even at an office desk. Therefore the assumption is that he’s working. And he might be the only one within his peer-group of cats and dogs and other cute animals who has a stable income.

So there you go. If Apple had any qualms or concerns as to how to approach the more sensitive and racially charged aspects of stickers and emoji, a pretty good way at going about it is to sometimes represent characters as funny, cute or silly. Or you can represent them as just your average productive member of their sticker/emoji society.

*On a side note, here’s some data on the relative popularity of KakaoTalk in comparison to other big name Asian chat-apps. As you can see, KakaoTalk, from a global perspective, is no longer the top Korean chat-app. That distinction now belongs to LINE. It will be interesting to see how LINE handles this issue.