1/4/2024 0 Comments Emoji texts![]() ![]() Prior to its most recent operating system update, Samsung’s emoji keyboards sported purple owls, rather than the brown species native to other devices (□) savoury crackers rather than sweet cookies (□) Korean flags rather than Japanese (□) and many other idiosyncrasies. These are isolated cases, to be sure, but it is perhaps more concerning that Samsung, undisputed champion of the smartphone market, once took emoji noncomformity to new height. (Only now is a consensus emerging that a harmless water pistol is the most appropriate design.) Or that for many years, smartphones running Google’s Android operating system displayed the “yellow heart” emoji (□) as a hairy pink heart - the result of a radical misinterpretation of Unicode’s halftone exemplar - that was at odds with every other vendor’s design. As such, in choosing an emoji, the writer of a text may inadvertently select a quite different icon than the one that is ultimately displayed to their correspondent.Ĭonsider the pistol emoji (□), which, at different times and on different platforms, has been displayed as a modern handgun, a flintlock pistol, and a sci-fi ray-gun. As such, Google, Apple, Facebook and other emoji vendors have each crafted their own interpretations of Unicode’s sample symbols, but those interpretations do not always agree. It suggests, yes, but it does not insist. Although Unicode defines code points for all emoji, the consortium does not specify a standard visual appearance for them. If missing emoji are at least obvious to the reader, the problem of misleading emoji is not. Smartphones, which rely on the generosity of their manufacturers for such updates, are worst off: a typical smartphone will fall off the upgrade wagon two or three years after it first goes on sale, so that there is a long tail of devices that are perpetually stranded in bygone emoji worlds. The appearance of placeholder characters – ‘☒’, colloquially called “tofu” – is not uncommon, especially in the wake of emoji season as computing devices await software upgrades to bring them up to date. (Of note has been a commendable and ongoing drive to improve emoji’s representation of gender, ethnicity and religious practices.) Thus “emoji season” was born, that time of the year when Unicode’s annual update has journalists and bloggers scouring code charts for new emoji.Īnd therein lies a problem: emoji updates are so frequent, and so comprehensive, that it is by no means certain that the reader of any given digital text possesses a device that can render it faithfully. Almost from the very beginning – that being 2007, when Google and Unicode standardised Japan’s divergent emoji sets for use in Gmail – Unicode has been on the receiving end of countless requests for new emoji, or variations on existing symbols. And, unlike the scripts with which Unicode has traditionally concerned itself, emoji are positively alive with change. Almost by accident, what was once a head-down, unhurried organisation now finds itself to be responsible for one of the most visible symbols of online discourse. And now, having colonised SMS messages and social media, blogs and books, court filings and comic books, these uniquely challenging characters can no longer be ignored.Īs with essentially all modern digital text encodings, emoji lie within the purview of the Unicode Consortium. It was only in 2019, twenty years after emoji’s supposed birth at NTT, that the truth came out.ĭoes it matter, when considering the structure and transmission of text, that for two decades our understanding of emoji’s history was wrong? Safe to say that it does not, but it serves as a salutary reminder for those who care about such things that emoji are slippery customers. It is true that in 1999, NTT used emoji to jazz up their nascent mobile internet service, but emoji had been created some years earlier by a rival mobile network. Stung by a backlash from their customers, in 1999 NTT invented emoji as compensation, and the rest is history. Emoji’s founding myth tells that telecoms operator NTT DOCOMO, at the height of Japan’s pager boom of the 1990s, removed a popular ‘♥️’ icon from their pagers to make room for business-oriented symbols such as kanji and the Latin alphabet. ![]() It started with a heart, so the story goes. Either way, enjoy, and please read to the end for more details on The Future of Text, including where to download a copy. ![]() Some of it will be familiar if you’ve been following along, and some of it may not. It forms a kind of introduction to, or perhaps a summary of, the contents of my series on emoji. I wrote the following post for The Future of Text, a collection of essays exploring the past, present and future of text in all its many forms. Start at PART 1 or view ALL POSTS in the series. This is the most recent in a series of thirteen posts on Emoji (□).
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