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Frowny face of concern at who gets to define global language
● We tend to think of the internet as a lawless space where pretty much anything goes. But there is at least one reservation carved out of our digital jungle that is surprisingly tightly controlled: emojis, those smiley yellow faces and red love hearts so beloved by the visually expressive, inventive teenagers and Instagram influencers.
At present, the Unicode Consortium, a nonprofit organisation run by some of the world’s biggest technology companies, maintains an exclusive grip on what constitutes an emoji.
There are good technical reasons for doing so. If emojis, like scripts, are to work across rival platforms, they need a common code and keyboard, even if the pictographs are sometimes rendered in different designs by different operators.
The “face with tears of joy” laughing faces on WhatsApp are subtly different to those used by Google, for example.
Last month, the consortium approved 168 new emojis, adding, among others, genderneutral firefighters, judges and astronauts as well as more figures in wheelchairs. That took the total number of emojis to 3,178.
There is no doubt that emojis play an important role in shaping social interactions and emotional exchanges for people around the world.
About 2.9-billion users in 212 countries sprinkle them across texts, tweets and messages, making emoji by far the most widely used global language, a kind of digital Esperanto.
Their influence has even been acknowlTaiwanese edged by the high priests of the English language, the Oxford Dictionaries, which chose the tears of joy emoji for its “word” of the year in 2015.
For most users, these pictorial words, the body language of the internet, are nothing more than harmless fun, embellishing, or even replacing, what you can say with text.
If a picture paints a thousand words then an emoji can depict a dozen. When I WhatsApped my teenage son recently to check whether he had done something he had promised not to do, he replied: “Maybe,” accompanied by a pair of shifty looking eyes.
That emoji conveyed a sense of humour (and guilt) far more succinctly than any words. It is for that reason that machinereading programs find it extremely hard to interpret the complex contextual nuance of emojis.
However, as is so often the way with the internet, what started out as innocent play has turned into serious business.
The adoption and use of emojis are now subject to corporate lobbying, civic campaigning and geopolitical bullying. The Russian government has tried to stop operators using emojis of gay families. The Chinese government has resisted the inclusion of the
Emoji shouldn’t be decided upon by predominantly white, male, American text and coding engineers Keith Winstein
Computer science professor at Stanford University
flag.
The consortium is now trying to perform a delicate cultural and political dance for which it was never designed.
Unicode’s emoji subcommittee, which includes software developers, designers and linguists from the likes of Apple, Google, Facebook, Huawei and Microsoft, meets four times a year to consider public requests for new emojis.
In recent years, it has responded to evolving demands by adding more emoji skin colours and female professions. Dumplings, hijabs and the rainbow flag have also been included.
But in a compelling new video, the documentary filmmaker Mea Dols de Jong scrutinised whether the committee is adequately equipped to fulfil such a sensitive role.
Are these “plumbers of the internet” really best-placed to bestow public affirmation — or rejection — of different communities, causes or interests by adopting emojis representing menstruation, or the Tibetan or transgender flags, or the brontosaurus, or white wine?
Keith Winstein, a computer science professor at Stanford University, expressed his doubts. “If you believe emoji is an emerging world language, it shouldn’t be decided upon by a bunch of predominantly white, predominantly male, predominantly American text and coding engineers in California,” he says in the film. “That is not a good way to run a language.”
No matter how imperfect the current system, it is easy to imagine far worse. We really do not want governments, or multilateral agencies, or profit-making corporations messing with our emojis.
That makes it vital that the consortium is seen as trustworthy, responsive to global public interests, while also resistant to political or corporate pressure.
The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once said: “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” In a smaller and quirkier way, emojis risk being similarly restrictive. We should be careful that a small sliver of humanity does not arbitrarily limit the full expression of human experience.
© The Financial Times