The little ideogram that could: how emoji are changing the face of 21st-century communication

BY GLENN VAN ZUTPHEN

Jennifer 8. Lee, champion of more inclusive and representative emoji, discusses the long journey from idea to 💬.

Emoji. The little representations of everything from our current state of mind to common objects, places, weather, animals, what we ate today, and even what our relationships look like. Originally meaning pictograph, the word emojicomes from Japanese and translates into “picture” plus “character.”

The first set of emoji was released by J-Phone in 1997. It included 90 of them, but the phone was expensive and not widely adopted. Two years later Japanese artist Shigetaka Kurita created the first widely used set of 176 emoji while working on NTT DoCoMo’s i-mode mobile Internet platform. It is said that he was inspired by several things: symbols used in weather forecasts, Chinese characters, street signs, and stock symbols used in manga comic books. Kurita’s original set is now part of the permanent collection at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

It’s hard to imagine our current texting lives without these little giants of visual communication. Even the acclaimed Oxford Dictionaries came onboard in 2015 when it named the ‘Face with Tears of Joy’ emoji as the Word of the Year. Its president Casper Grathwohl said at the time, “traditional alphabet scripts have been struggling to meet the rapid-fire, visually focused demands of 21st Century communication. It’s not surprising that a pictographic script like emoji has stepped in to fill those gaps — it’s flexible, immediate, and infuses tone beautifully.” Now a simple surf to emojipedia.org unfolds the universe of ideograms.

At the March 2019 Google Newsgeist Un-Conference in Singapore, Jennifer 8. Lee talked about these little friends. The American journalist, author, and producer is also a vice-chair of the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee. The subcommittee meets every week to consider all manner of emoji challenges and to recommend new ones. Lee helped to get the dumpling and hijab emoji passed, for example. The subcommittee then makes recommendations to the Unicode Consortium Technical Committee, which maintains text standards across computers, for final approval.

AAJA: What are the challenges and the goals around representation?

J8L: There’s debate about whether emoji are actually counted as a language. Let’s look at why. What are emoji good at? They are good at nouns which are objects. They are good at verbs which involve nouns and objects. So, to sing you have a microphone, to skateboard there is a skateboard. But verbs are little bit tricky; how would you say the word ‘to cheat’ in emoji? How would you say the noun ‘growth?’

Emoji also are very good at emotional states. Happy, sad-type adjectives that are descriptive of emotional states. They’re also good at very interesting subsets of adjectives and colors, for example. One of the really interesting things about adjectives is that you see people being creative: small becomes mouse, big is elephant, slow is a snail or turtle. It can become more complex as you analyze what emoji combinations mean. For example, ‘tapas’ might be mouse and plate: so mouse plate, small plate is tapas.

AAJA: What about more personal descriptors?

J8L: The major missing emoji is that there’s no word for ‘I,’ and no word for ‘you.’ That’s actually a problem in terms of linguistics; sometimes there’s a sort of ‘up’ arrow and ‘down’ arrow, to represent ‘I’ and ‘you’, or they will use a finger pointing left, or a finger pointing right. But what seems to be emerging is that people are using the human figures to represent themselves. I used the pale girl with the dark hair to represent me. What you’re seeing is a lot of demand. The people trying to say the word ‘I’ and the way they’re trying to pursue skin color.

Hair is another big thing: redheads are so passionate and were so angry that there were no redheads, or curly hair, or beards. It is part of this very organic demand of saying ‘I.’ Chromatically, it becomes very interesting.

AAJA: Can’t you just use the eye emoji?

J8L: It doesn’t always work in languages that are not English.

AAJA: The use of and creativity around emoji must certainly be generational?

J8L: Yes. We have a generation of kids who are going to read and write emoji, before they can read or write their native language. Their first ability to communicate in a written form is through what they can pick and choose on the emoji keyboard. It gets really interesting because the universe of what you know to exist is in the context of this emoji keyboard: whether you see certain food, whether you see women’s flat shoes, any kind of clothes, are very micro representations of the universe that you know to exist. I care very much about this.

AAJA: What about the ability to choose the color of your ‘thumbs up,’ for example. It’s getting tricky to know what exact color to use.

J8L: Originally emoji were supposed to have no skin color. Different systems chose different generic colors to be in neutral colors. Apple chose yellow, Microsoft chose grey — which is really creepy, like if you really look at the old Microsoft emoji, they looked like the monsters that hid underneath your bed! First of all, they were grey and they also had pointy ears. They looked like aliens, and that went against being neutral. But in America, yellow is the Simpsons (cartoon) which is actually kind of white. People do complain about skin color, but this is the kind of the beauty of Unicode, where anyone can propose changes.

There was a black mother in Texas, Katrina Parrott, whose daughter was 14 years old and came home one day and said, “You know, I really like to see myself represented in emoji.” So she learned what emoji were and she did this big proposal that basically ended up introducing skin tones.

I think what’s interesting is America is probably the most obsessed about race. The Americans said, “No it’s really, really important to users. So, you have to add six (color) characters for every one character and really now 12 characters, because we have male and female. That’s why they added it, in part because Americans care about race so much.

AAJA: I think it’s kind of cool though. My wife is a fair-skinned African-American, so our kids are cappuccino. The different skin tones really work for our family. People should feel like they can relate to emoji, right?

J8L: Now interracial couples are coming to emoji. People love this topic. We have to add many new characters to cover all of the combinations and it gets complicated as we add characters for male-male or female-female in order to be non-gender binary. And as society evolves, we see non-gendered older adults, non-gendered children so the number of characters keeps growing. In terms of a single Unicode decision triggering the most number of characters, gender neutrality has been huge.

AAJA: What about the blended families?

J8L: We really want skin tones applied to families because right now you can only be a yellow family, and black families and other families are agitated about that because they don’t see themselves represented in the keyboard. But the combinatoric explosion around families across all the skin tones is really a challenge. I’ve seen different calculations. But it’s something like 4,500 and 50 plus change-combinations if you have all the family combinations: two parents, one kid; two parents, two kids; one parent, one kid; one parent, two kids; five skin tones across everything and genders across everything. It’s complicated.

The reason why there were no skin tones to begin with is that they started in Japan where everyone is basically kind of the same color. So Westerners are conveyed by the blonde person; there is also a character which is called blonde meaning kind of like Gaijin or Western and that is a hard coded character because that was the original Japanese emoji set. Then there is a man in a turban who is supposed to represent an Indian person. And then there is a man with a little kind of hat and he is supposed to represent a Chinese person.

And that was how you conveyed what was the Japanese notion of identity and race back in those days. You have blonde people which are Western. You have Indian people in a very kind of stereotypical way, and you have Chinese people. There were no black people in that version but that is their world divided into like four little pockets.

We decided the skin tones on the Fitzpatrick skin system which is a dermatological system based on how likely you are to get skin cancer. They took that and they applied it to emoji.

AAJA: Does it really matter that we might have hundreds of color combinations? I mean, who really cares … just give people options.

J8L: It doesn’t matter on our fancy iOS or Android phones. It does matter on the $50 entryphone in Uganda because those the emoji characters are a heavy load — from font size to their memory size. It really matters to them and it’s hard to find a standard UX fix across devices.

AAJA: Tell us about the mosquito.

J8L: The mosquito was really important to us and the Gates Foundation from a public health perspective. Like if you’re a public health official and you are trying to communicate with people who speak indigenous minority languages in the regions where malaria is definitely an issue. One of the other areas that we are focusing on is from a healthcare perspective. Oftentimes you have doctors who can’t communicate with their patients in a spoken language in a critical situation. We’re trying to figure out the set of emoji that is most helpful from a healthcare perspective.

AAJA: Who joins the emoji committee?

J8L: Companies pay $18,000 a year to have full voting privileges on the Unicode Consortium, though it’s about to go up. But anyone can join the Unicode Consortium as a non-voting individual. You pay $75 and you’re on the email list and can show up to the meetings. To get on the subcommittee involves some level of doing work and being willing to do an hour and a half phone call every weekend 8 am Pacific Standard Time. It is through persistence and doing work you can get on the subcommittee; it helps if you bring a diverse viewpoint, whether through profession or a region of the world. We need more designers. We need more linguists. It’s cool because you can do something that impacts billions of keyboards.🗨️

Glenn van Zutphen is an AAJA Asia Member and a journalist based in Singapore.