From British linguist
of information — language is just one. The two other important ones are paralanguage, and that's how you're delivering the words, so tone of voice, and the really big one is kinesics, and that has to do with action-based, nonverbal communication.
Emoji functions analogously to tone of voice and to body language in text-speak, and without it we're reduced communicators. This gives rise to what I refer to as “the angry jerk phenomenon.” Digital communication (can) suck out the empathy of the message and reduce all the nuance, and someone we know to be otherwise calm and sane comes across as a complete, angry-sounding jerk.
Q: Do emojis have a weakness?
A: Probably the most significant weakness comes from how it's controlled. It's controlled by Unicode, which is a California-based consortium that was founded in 1988, and this particular organization (provides an international standard for) fonts and scripts, so this is noble and important. The (members include) eight of the North American giants: Adobe, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, IBM, Oracle and Yahoo. And there are 3 non-North American organizations. These organizations have a number of rules and regulations that govern emoji, and one is that for something to be accepted as a new emoji, it must be iconic in nature, it must be pictographic, so what that means is the thing that does the representing of the idea must look like the idea it's representing. Q: Is that a problem? A: The problem is that emoji cannot represent more abstract ideas, because it's limited up front in terms of what the symbols look like or can be. How do you represent feminism using an emoji? You can't. How do you represent iconoclastic? Or memory?
Q: Is there a censorship issue?
A: Emoji is potentially on a slippery slope to censorship. This goes back to (Unicode) rules and regulations and, arguably, the political correctness of Unicode, the gatekeeper, which is a force for good, but also in the overzealous interpretation of what is correct and what is good, this can potentially lead to an Orwellian nightmare. I'm not saying that's where we are, (but) just to give you an example, there have been a spate of court cases the last 18 months or so, where people have been arrested for issuing threats of various kinds (in the form of) sending gun emojis. In a case in France last year, a man in his 20s was sentenced to three months in (jail) for sending a gun emoji directed at his ex-girlfriend. What Apple did in its update last year was to change the representation of the gun, which previously was a revolver, to a water pistol, a harmless child's toy. These companies that sit on Unicode, that have shareholders and images they need to protect, are in essence constraining what the world's 3.2 billion internet users are able to use emoji to express.
Q: What's your favorite emoji?
A: My favorite is the dancing lady in the red dress.
Q: Oh, I like her too. Why do you like her?
A: I like her because she's inherently sexy. I kept saying this to people when they asked me what's your favorite emoji and my wife said, ‘But you never use it!' So I started sending this emoji to my wife.