Who are the keepers of the emoji?
A committee regularly meets to decide what will and won’t join growing array of symbols
The long torment of the gingers is over. People of reddish hair are finally to be represented, alongside all the other peoples of the world, in the library of emoji. They are among 157 new pictograms soon to appear on your smartphone, along with superheroes, llamas, magnets and fire extinguishers. All human life, clearly, is here.
Since their launch in 1999, emoji — cute pictograms that add emotional nuances to emails, texts and chats — have become something of a universal language. Back then, there were only 176; now, there are more than 2,600. They run the gamut of human experience, from joy and confusion to snowmen and witchcraft. But some seem oddly chosen: why is there a clock face for all 24 hours of the day? How many different types of train emoji do we need? And why is there so much Japanese food? Who, in other words, picks these symbols, and where do they come from?
A sleepy Californian non-profit organization called the Unicode Consortium was thrust, by the emoji’s unexpected popularity, into the role as arbiter of these contemporary hieroglyphics. It is to this digital Academie Francaise that ideas for emoji are submitted by the general public are considered and hotly debated.
Set up in 1991, its original purpose was to help bring order to the digital babel that emerged after the dawn of the World Wide Web. Back then, computers in different countries often used the same unique ID number to specify different characters in different alphabets, so an email sent in Hindi might come out on a Russian machine as a nonsensical jumble of Cyrillic. Unicode solved this by using up to a million IDs, making room for Bengali, Cherokee, braille and the International Phonetic Alphabet. And for the next 15 years, expanding this library was the Consortium’s primary task.
Then, in the late Noughties, a fateful decision was made to incorporate emoji into Unicode. Emoji had been created by Japanese mobile phone companies, who competed with each other to give their users more and better symbols to cheer up their text messages. (The word “emoji” has nothing to do with emotions — it simply combines the Japanese words for “picture” and “character”.)
Who could have predicted that by 2017 more than five billion emoji would be used on Facebook Messenger each day? It soon became clear that, to meet the public demand, new emoji would constantly be in demand — and that the possibilities would be infinite. To ensure the emoji alphabet was manageable, and with a one-in-one-out policy considered impractical, the Consortium opted instead for a robust selection process. By 2015 the Unicode Emoji Committee had been formed: a small group that meets twice a week to debate whether “milk” should be depicted in a carton or a bottle, and whether bread should appear sliced. The best proposals are sent to another committee, meeting four times a year, for final approval.
Anyone can submit a new emoji to the Consortium, but the procedure is not simple. First, you need to be aware of the ground rules. An emoji should not represent a specific person, living or dead (the David Bowie emoji is officially called “Man Singer”). There must be no trademarks, no deities, and no swastikas. You will need to prove that your emoji is distinct from an existing character; that there is a real appetite out there for it to be used; that it’s specific enough to be useful but vague enough to be universal. You also need to show it has longevity: the Consortium frowns on fads.
All kinds of people submit emoji. Florie Hutchinson, a PR adviser in San Francisco, proposed a woman’s flat shoe, which is among the new symbols accepted. “I realized that the only emoji for women’s shoes at that time was a red high-heeled stiletto,” she told me — then sent me the five-page document she submitted with Google search data proving women around the world wear flats. Rayouf Alhumedhi, a Saudi teenager living in Germany, was just 15 when she successfully pitched “person with hijab.” “I just wanted an emoji of me,” she said.
But making these decisions has put the Consortium in a difficult role. It has been accused of replicating sexist stereotypes by having too many emoji of high heels and painted nails and not enough of women in professional roles. It has also added darker skin tones for the more realistic human emoji. The pistol sign has been so contentious that Apple renders it as a water pistol; the same company blocked the acceptance of a rifle emoji by threatening to bar it from its devices.
Then there are those who feel like emoji are a big distraction. In 2015, an internationally renowned typographer and longtime Unicode contributor named Michael Everson wrote a furious email to the Consortium, lambasting it for ignoring his request for esoteric punctuation marks that he needed to edit a medieval Cornish manuscript. “What does it take to get your attention, folks?” he complained. “An April Fools’ proposal for EMOJI PUNCTUS EXCLAMATIVUS MARK?”
Another typographer, Andrew West, has accused the Consortium of being too opaque and secretive about its work. “Emoji are among the most controversial characters that get encoded,” he wrote during a spat over the adoption of a frowny-faced poo. “Yet they are rushed through with the minimum of scrutiny and public consultation.” He wants public minutes and a mandatory waiting period.
The system is unlikely to change. Unicode’s voting members include the world’s biggest tech companies, as well as Berkeley University and the government of India. They are the key bodies who have to implement emoji and they seem to be happy with the arrangement.
So if you want to convince the world it truly needs a pug emoji, or even a Sumerian diacritic mark, all you have to do is go before the elders of the Unicode Consortium and make your case. Grimace-face emoji, as they say in emoji. London Daily Telegraph
Anyone can submit a new emoji to the Consortium, but the procedure is not simple. First, you need to be aware of the ground rules.