popular science

emoji

POPSCI.COM.AU 61

Kelly ired ofa post onher blog,launchedapetition on

change.org, and fedquotes toThe Guardianandothermedia

outlets.Butshesoon discovered it would take much more

than an online protest toget her way. But it wasn’t because

theproblem was considered trivial. Far from it.

Emoji are subject to a complex technicalbureaucracy. The

type and number of new pictograms released each year are

strictly controlled by the Unicode Consortium, an interna-

tional organisation—including, most notably, representatives

from Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Adobe. Unicode’s core

mission is to convert the world’s alphabets and symbols into

codethat all smartphones, desktops, laptops, and computers

can read. The dollar sign, no matter the phone or font, is

U+0024. The taco: U+1F32E. Websites, email clients,word

processors, and other interfaces then transform that code into

wordsandicons—and vice versa.

For most of its 27-year history, Unicode was concerned

with simplecharacters—musicaland mathematicalnota-

tions, currency signs, punctuation marks. Starting a decade

ago, this group of accomplished linguists, font designers,

and software developers begl ers began including the smileys that

had become popular across several Japal Japanese telecom compa-

nies. Thereafter, these technical overlords wds were tasked with

debating such matters as the prevalence of unicornorns and the

cultural import of small piles of poop. A deeper look att

Kelly’s campaign for ginger representation reveals that they ey

take this responsibility very, very seriously.

CHAPTER ONE

Adopting pixelated cuteness

Emojibegan in 1999 in Japan, a country with a long history of

pictographic language. In 2007, Unicode members started seri-

ously debating how to includestylized picture characters to make

it easier to exchange them across platforms. By 2010, the updated

Unicodestandard, version 6.0, included722 emoji.

MICHAEL EVERSON,linguist; Irishnational representative

to the International Organisationfor Standardisation, which

helps develop Unicode:Emojiwerelittlepixelatedimages that

people could send along with their text messages in order to

augment them withcuteness. Alot of peoplethoughtall of

this stufwas, shall we say, unsuitable for encoding.

DOUGEWELL,emeritus member, Unicode Consortium:Are

people going to be sending each other face-palm emoji in 10

or20years?It’s like encoding a shag carpet.

EVERSON:We said,OK,if it has tobe done,it has tobe done.

EWELL:What Unicode ended up doing was to add these

emoji to the standard in such a way that it would be possible

to interchange them as if they’re characters.

PAUL HUNT,font and typeface designer, Adobe Systems; member,

Unicode Consortium emoji subcommittee:To your computer, it’s

just the same as a letter A or a Greek Alpha. Your computer

seesacodethat maps to a particular concept. For alphabets

and other writing systems, the code matches to letters. For

emoji, i t maps to a particular littlepicture.

EVERSON:We added a whole bunch of emoji and moved

on. Nobody knew what was going to happen.

EWELL:We assumed it was not going to grow out of control,

and,overthe years,itdid.

FRED BENENSON,author ofEmoji Dickk, a version of the novel

translated into emoji:Integrating emoji into Unicode turned

them into a standard that was easy for hardware vendors to

MAGES;

ROBERT

DEUTSCHMAN/GETTY IMA

© EM OJIONE