ORIGIN TALE: WHERE DO EMOJIS COME FROM?
There’s a lot of sushi on the emoji keyboard, and more meals in a bowl than most people need. And that’s not an accident. The emoji was born in Japan. It is now administered by the Unicode Consortium (UC), a Us-based not-for-profit network started by software engineers Joe Becker, Mark Davis and Lee Collins.
Unicode is an open-source initiative that essentially works with platforms like Google and Microsoft to ensure that languages look similar across websites, browsers and devices. They began working with emojis in 2010, uniformalising and expanding the little pictorial dictionary. Amid calls to make it more inclusive, there are now more races represented, and more cultures and cuisines. such a member for an annual fee of $18,000.
Once approved, they are forwarded to the technical committee, for eventual design and rollout. Each new emoji is posted on the Unicode website for public feedback. A final batch of new emojis is released each June.
In 2017, 56 new emojis were added, along with 183 emojis sequences for gender, skin tone and flags variations.
Interestingly, likenesses of people (living, dead or fictional), deities and business logos are banned in the emoji world. Santa Claus is the only exception.
Once the new emojis are launched, it is up to the vendors [Apple, Facebook etc] to choose which ones they want to support on their operating systems. The bulbous, purple eggplant was added to the Unicode emoji set in 2011, and soon became code for the penis. In 2015, it was banned by Instagram for a while for violating its policy against sexual content. Hashtags like #eggplantfridays were being used to push nude images. The original was a standard pistol. In 2016, amid anti-gun activism in the US, and mass shootings, Apple redesigned the emoji as a colourful squirt gun. Google, Facebook, Samsung and Twitter did too. Microsoft’s gun too looks like a water pistol now. Some still want the symbol banned.
BEFORE
AFTER When Emojipedia published a preview of their lobster emoji, some people were horrified. A lobster has 10 legs, and this creature only 8, they cried. And so the emoji was redesigned. The original was meant to be a Playboy Playmate. Women’s rights activists protested, so the solo woman turned into two partygoing pals. They got so popular that men wanted one too. We now have Two Dancing
Women and Two Dancing
Men With Bunny Ears. Scott E Fahlman, at Carnegie Mellon University, suggested using :-) and :-( to mark posts that were not to be taken seriously. Emoticons were born. Japanese artist Shigetaka Kurita developed 176 manga-inspired images for mobile service NTT Docomo. Japanese users loved them. Every company had their own emojis and chaos ruled. Google asked the Unicode Consortium to recognise emojis and create common codes for them. Apple released emojis for the smartphone in Japan. Other platforms followed, but sending an emoji from Apple to Android, still meant the recipient got blank boxes. Gmail added emojis. Fred Beneson retold Herman Melville’s Moby Dick entirely in emojis. People started to wonder if a new language was being born. Yay! Unicode finally standardised emojis so they appeared similar across all formats. A set of 722 emojis – emotions, poo, families, hearts, animals, clothes, food, city images, clocks, and country flags – were unleashed upon the world. The peach emoji for IOS also represents a well-sculpted butt. Some users even call it ‘the Kim butt’, after the voluptuous Kardashian. Apple’s 2016 update showed more fruit and no butt, but so upset users that a subsequent update returned the emoji to its former glory.
BEFORE Apple’s IOS 5 added an emoji keyboard. Other platforms did so too and emojis became convenient and compatible to share. Facebook got emojis for chat. Emoji entered the Oxford English Dictionary. An Emoji Art & Design Show featured emoji-themed work from over 20 artists. The first World Emoji Day was celebrated on July 17, picked because it is the default date on the IOS calendar emoji. Skin-tone emojis were released. Tears Of Joy emoji was Oxford dictionary’s word of the year, for best reflecting ‘the ethos, mood, and preoccupations of 2015’. New York’s Museum of Modern Art incorporated Docomo’s 176 emojis in its design heritage archive. Emojicon, a conference to make emojis more representative, was set up. Ugh, the awful, cheesy Emoji Movie made no one laugh.
AFTER The original salad emoji was lettuce, tomatoes and eggs. Vegans and vegetarians felt slighted because they ate more salad, but not eggs. So in June 2018, Google decided to remove the egg from its salad emoji to make it more inclusive. The bowl is now lettuce, tomatoes and cucumber: wholesome and 100% vegan. When Apple released a set of new emojis in 2015, it included the middle finger. Other than the fact that it doesn’t represent the rest of the hand accurately, in India, it ran afoul of protestors too. In December 2017, an Indian advocate sent a legal notice to Whatsapp calling the emoji lewd and obscene and demanding that it be removed. Whatsapp is yet to respond.
This is consistently the least-used emoji. But a Facebook group dedicated to transportation memes protested its removal. They urged the public to tweet the emoji from time to time — and now it’s the second-least popular emoji. The new least-popular? ABCD in a grid. Really, what is that for? About 92% online users use emojis. There are 2,789 emojis in the Unicode list, including special ones for Star Wars, FIFA and other time-bound events. Off Broadway, Emojiland: A Textistential Musical, is a tale of emojis inside a teen’s phone.