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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 intowordsandicons—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 toMAGES;
ROBERT
DEUTSCHMAN/GETTY IMA
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