Speaker 1: Oh hey, it's your building manager texting you so sorry
Speaker 1: to hear about the death of your pragmantis with a
Speaker 1: cry laughing emoji. Ali Ward with another episode of Ologies
Speaker 1: this week. What is it? What is it? What is it?
Speaker 1: It's emojis? Or is it emoji?
Speaker 2: Anyone who tries to police how you pluralize a word,
Speaker 2: you know there's no right answer. There just isn't.
Speaker 1: That is Jennifer Daniel, one of not one and not two,
Speaker 1: but three ologists we have on this very, very giant
Speaker 1: and dear to my heart episode about curiology. Jennifer is
Speaker 1: currently an emoji designer at Google who's responsible for designing
Speaker 1: a bunch of emojis, some that you're going to love,
Speaker 1: like a serious fan favorite, the melting face emoji. And
Speaker 1: Jennifer is also a member of the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee,
Speaker 1: which may have you sitting at home wondering what the
Speaker 1: heck is the Unicode And I promise you we're going
Speaker 1: to get into that, oh so soon. I didn't know either,
Speaker 1: and it's fascinating. So who else are we going to
Speaker 1: be hearing from? Well, there's Keith Brony.
Speaker 3: From a very technical perspective, it's emoji. But if you
Speaker 3: look at how people are actually using the term, it's emojis,
Speaker 3: and this is a classic example of language changing. If
Speaker 3: you want to be really, really technical, it's a Japanese term,
Speaker 3: and emoji picture character is both the singular and the plural.
Speaker 1: Keith is the current editor in chief of Emojipedia, who,
Speaker 1: after writing his dissertation on the use of emojis at
Speaker 1: University College London, became the world's first professional emoji translator
Speaker 1: and shares what I would perhaps describe as an academic
Speaker 1: perspective throughout what will be this big two parter on
Speaker 1: this daily part of our lives emoji. And finally Jeremy Birch,
Speaker 1: who founded a mochipedia that was me in twenty thirteen
Speaker 1: I did, and until very recently represented Emojipedia in the
Speaker 1: Unicode Technical Committee. We're going to get in the trenches
Speaker 1: of emojis, the real gritty, find the scenes, backstage worlds
Speaker 1: of face beloved and mercurial little language cartoons. But first
Speaker 1: we like to do a little thanks up top. Thank
Speaker 1: you to patrons support us and let us make donations
Speaker 1: every week to charities of the ologists, choosing for as
Speaker 1: little as a buck a month. You can join patroon
Speaker 1: dot com slash ologies, and you make that possible. You
Speaker 1: also get to make questions for our ologists. I may
Speaker 1: be saying your name on the show, but we also
Speaker 1: like to read a review every week, because, as you know,
Speaker 1: I read them all and then I pick one. And
Speaker 1: this week's comes from Andrea O Karina or Andrea or
Speaker 1: Andrea Okarina, who wrote, Hey, bestie, I feel like Mulder
Speaker 1: talking to anyone who will listen except to talk about
Speaker 1: your podcast and not aliens. I hope you read this. Hey,
Speaker 1: guess what I did? And maybe I read your name wrong,
Speaker 1: but I read it a couple times, so hopefully I
Speaker 1: got it right. Thank you everyone who leaves reviews. I
Speaker 1: read them and sometimes I weep in the best way. Okay, curiology,
Speaker 1: let's get into it. I've been waiting years for this.
Speaker 1: So curiology comes from curiologic, which means representing things by
Speaker 1: their pictures instead of by symbols, and it comes from
Speaker 1: a Greek word curio loggia, meaning op language. And where
Speaker 1: can you kick this off with a bit of debate
Speaker 1: about this term with our three ologists. Let's get into
Speaker 1: it with curiologists. Jennifer Daniel Keith Brony and who you'll
Speaker 1: hear from first, Jeremy Birch. Now, okay, there is a
Speaker 1: little bit of controversy about theology.
Speaker 4: For this topic is the yes, I love controversy.
Speaker 1: Okay, good. So this topic has been the inception of
Speaker 1: all of ologies, which has changed my whole life. Is
Speaker 1: a big one for okay, okay, which is why I
Speaker 1: needed to call in the big guy.
Speaker 4: I feel depression, I know, okay.
Speaker 1: So ology started because twenty years ago, twenty one years ago,
Speaker 1: I was on the internet. There was a baby baby website,
Speaker 1: like a GeoCities type of website, or.
Speaker 4: An angel Fire or a classic classic.
Speaker 1: And it listed all the ologies and I landed on
Speaker 1: that page because I was trying to come up with
Speaker 1: a name for an art company that I was starting,
Speaker 1: and I wanted to know if curiology was a real word.
Speaker 1: And I found out via this little website that it
Speaker 1: means writing with pictures.
Speaker 4: Okay.
Speaker 1: So I was an illustrator at the time, so like
Speaker 1: writing with pictures. It definitely I responded well to that,
Speaker 1: and so I called my company Curiology Forever. But I
Speaker 1: in the back of my head, I always had this
Speaker 1: list of ologies that I wanted to do something with,
Speaker 1: make a book or do you know it's sad. And
Speaker 1: so when it came time to do an emoji's episode,
Speaker 1: I am of the belief that it is somewhat like
Speaker 1: writing with pictures because you're conveying something, but you're shaking
Speaker 1: your head a little well nothing, no, no, no.
Speaker 4: No, I no, I do I agree? You know you
Speaker 4: know the first thing. It often happens in any kind
Speaker 4: of discussion of emojis. Some people feel like it's a
Speaker 4: language and a way of communicating and it's not. But
Speaker 4: I think you're right. I'm not shaking my head. In fact,
Speaker 4: I think I meant to nod, because that's the etymology
Speaker 4: of emoji. That's what the word emoji means, this picture
Speaker 4: character in Japanese. So I think you couldn't be more accurate,
Speaker 4: almost to the actual meaning.
Speaker 1: So that you are a creologist, then I love that.
Speaker 4: I mean, that makes me sound much more impressive. Thought. Yeah,
Speaker 4: And how.
Speaker 1: About our active Unicode board member and an emoji designer,
Speaker 1: Jennifer Daniel, does she approve.
Speaker 2: A free dictionary is telling me the representation of things
Speaker 2: or sounds by means of her picture instead of symbols
Speaker 2: or words.
Speaker 1: So would that be I feel like emojis that that applies.
Speaker 1: And if it doesn't count, you can tell me why.
Speaker 2: Geology is great. Creology is great. You know, when I
Speaker 2: think about emoji, I think historically they are firmly grounded
Speaker 2: in a visual space. But as we start to communicate
Speaker 2: outside of SMS text messaging, which is kind of a
Speaker 2: legacy of the past, it's not a purely visual form anymore.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: It really is supplemental to gesture and intonation and body
Speaker 2: language and all of these things. But there is without
Speaker 2: a doubt that emoji have a visual representation, in which
Speaker 2: case it would be perfectly suitable for creology.
Speaker 1: Okay, so far two for two on curiology, which delights me.
Speaker 1: But how about the current editor in chief of Emojipedia,
Speaker 1: professional emoji translator, Keith Brony, who literally wrote his dissertation
Speaker 1: on the use of emojis.
Speaker 3: What's his take in terms of being a creologist. I mean,
Speaker 3: the emoji keyboard is not just a set of you know,
Speaker 3: literal pictographic depictions of objects. There is a lot of
Speaker 3: idiograms in there as well. There's the classic heart idiograms,
Speaker 3: where that's not a literal depiction of a human heart,
Speaker 3: but people associate that particular design with affection. There's also,
Speaker 3: of course, all of the various smiley faces that have
Speaker 3: those ideograms kind of within them, as well as the
Speaker 3: face with two big hard eyes as the face surrounded
Speaker 3: by hearts. There's the face kind of blowing, kind of
Speaker 3: a kiss that has a little heart they're representing it.
Speaker 3: So the emoji keyboard is a kind of a mix
Speaker 3: of genuine representations of objects, but there's also so many
Speaker 3: metaphorical symbolic representations of concept as well, So it's kind of.
Speaker 4: A mix of both.
Speaker 3: In the category of the smiley emojis, I mean, there's
Speaker 3: so many expressions there that obviously we with our faces
Speaker 3: cannot literally do. I mean, we cannot turn our eyes
Speaker 3: into hearts, we cannot turn our eyes into stars.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 3: The various ways in which sweat drops or tear drops
Speaker 3: are utilized across the smiley faces are a very cartoonish
Speaker 3: in nature. I mean, a lot of the design conventions
Speaker 3: used across the emoji keyboard are drawn from comic book
Speaker 3: conventions or conventions in anime and manga.
Speaker 1: I had no idea about the influence of comic book
Speaker 1: ard on emoji design. It also came up talking to
Speaker 1: Jennifer who mentioned the work of Neil Kohne, who's a
Speaker 1: cognitive scientist and a comics theorist. And Neil was nominated
Speaker 1: for a twenty twenty one Eisner Award, which is like
Speaker 1: the Oscars for Comics for best academic scholarly work. And
Speaker 1: he wrote a book Who Understands Comics, questioning the universality
Speaker 1: of visual language comprehension, and that presents this theory that
Speaker 1: he has that drawings and sequential images are structured the
Speaker 1: same as language. So I don't know, maybe we can
Speaker 1: get him on the show sometime to discuss comics. I
Speaker 1: don't know what that would be. Maybe graphic nurotology actually
Speaker 1: scratch that. I just looked it up, and people do
Speaker 1: use comicology to talk about this art. We're going to
Speaker 1: workshop it maybe a later day we'll have that episode anyway,
Speaker 1: take it away, Jennifer.
Speaker 2: He's amazing. For example, he collected a large number of
Speaker 2: manga and comic books and then all the faces that
Speaker 2: were in each one of these, created a taxonomy of
Speaker 2: the different facial expressions and identified sixty nine unique expressions
Speaker 2: that all had very distinct meaning. So I took those
Speaker 2: sixty nine expressions and then said, Okay, this one's represented
Speaker 2: an emoji. This one's represented an emoji, this one isn't
Speaker 2: oh wow, this one is. This one's like similar enough.
Speaker 2: But then there was one that was like paperification because
Speaker 2: it's paper magazine. Right when the character kind of wants
Speaker 2: to disappear, they kind of turn into paper and float away.
Speaker 1: Oh wow.
Speaker 2: And so between that and this other convention, which was
Speaker 2: changing the opacity of a character to make them all transparent,
Speaker 2: we got dotted line face, so you're disappearing, and we
Speaker 2: got melty face.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: You are able to take these conventions. And that's the
Speaker 2: thing is, like you're you can never really make something new.
Speaker 2: I think that's a common misconception that you have to
Speaker 2: make something new, but it's really something that's existed for
Speaker 2: a really, really well.
Speaker 1: One time, Jared had this viral tweet about how most
Speaker 1: domestic partnerships are just urgently demanding that your partner look
Speaker 1: at your pet, like, look at them, look at them,
Speaker 1: even though they're exactly the same as they always are.
Speaker 1: And this tweet continues to make the rounds for years,
Speaker 1: and I always think that some of the most resonant
Speaker 1: or successful bits of art or comedy or whatever aren't
Speaker 1: something that no one has ever seen before, but actually
Speaker 1: identifying something everyone's familiar with but no one has really
Speaker 1: named or pointed out, at least not recently. That also
Speaker 1: seems to be what makes a successful new emoji as well,
Speaker 1: So the little tiny picture that you didn't know how
Speaker 1: much you needed. Anyway, back to talking to Keith about
Speaker 1: the question of curiology, I asked him if he thought
Speaker 1: it would be closer to the study of symbolic communication
Speaker 1: via semiotics.
Speaker 3: Emojis kind of sit in this fascinating place because they
Speaker 3: are a part of our keyboards. So it is fair
Speaker 3: enough to say that there's a huge element of curiological
Speaker 3: work in kind of dealing with emojis. There's a lot
Speaker 3: of semiotics as well. There's a lot of linguistics, there's
Speaker 3: a lot of design thinking.
Speaker 1: Okay, I'm calling that three for three. I think that's
Speaker 1: a slam dunk. Now. Some could argue that curiology is
Speaker 1: a more literal use of images as language, like with hieroglyphics,
Speaker 1: But until we start an IX podcast, I'm standing by curiology,
Speaker 1: all right, let's get into the history of emojis with Jeremy.
Speaker 1: When did emoji start?
Speaker 4: You know what? So that one of the confusing bits
Speaker 4: about the early emoji history is just the fact that
Speaker 4: I guess a lot of us sit around and I
Speaker 4: say us of I'm thirty eight. So for a reference,
Speaker 4: So when I grew up, a popular messaging app was
Speaker 4: MSN Messenger in Australia. I know over here Aol instant
Speaker 4: messengers popular and they had like Smiley's as well, and
Speaker 4: people are often like, aren't they emojis too? And they
Speaker 4: look very similar. But the reason that emoji became I
Speaker 4: guess universal, became on every platform is that they existed
Speaker 4: in Japan and the idea was you could insert them
Speaker 4: into regular text. You could have some normal text and
Speaker 4: put it alongside. That didn't matter which SMS you were
Speaker 4: using which platform, and that's sort of their origin story.
Speaker 4: And then the world expanded and we needed to be
Speaker 4: compatible with each other, so the rest of the world
Speaker 4: needed emoji support. Otherwise we could talked to our Japanese friends,
Speaker 4: and our Japanese friends would not be interested in mobile
Speaker 4: platforms from Apple and Google, which was their priority at
Speaker 4: the time.
Speaker 1: And when it comes to how they're displayed on different
Speaker 1: phones and different computers. Is there a code that says
Speaker 1: this is going to be someone weeping and melting, and
Speaker 1: then every different platform has to have a certain thing
Speaker 1: that represents that code.
Speaker 4: Yes. The origin of every emoji having a name is
Speaker 4: that in the early days, an emoji had a name,
Speaker 4: and each platform could do what they want with that.
Speaker 4: You'd have an emoji that says smiling face and you
Speaker 4: go easy, oh that, yeah, what, But then you get
Speaker 4: ones like face with handover mouth And this one was
Speaker 4: complicated because some platforms made the eyes look like they
Speaker 4: were laughing, some made the eyes look like they were serious.
Speaker 4: So if you imagine a face with a hand over
Speaker 4: the mouth, that can either be sort of shocked or
Speaker 4: I'm sorry, or it can be haha. It's very funny.
Speaker 4: And there's definitely been a plenty of people online who
Speaker 4: are run into trouble with this sort of influences and
Speaker 4: sort of a minus celebrities who might react to a
Speaker 4: news story thinking they're being sincere or you know, shocked,
Speaker 4: and other people see it on their phone is laughing,
Speaker 4: which is not what you want to do.
Speaker 1: Has that that's happened to celebrities, has.
Speaker 4: That it's definitely happened to celebrities.
Speaker 1: Oh, this definitely happens all the time, And some quick
Speaker 1: googling will take you to plenty of articles sharing emoji fails,
Speaker 1: which mostly seemed to be related to individuals who are
Speaker 1: just surely trying to express grief or sympathy through a text,
Speaker 1: usually related to an injury or the death of a
Speaker 1: pet or a loved one, and they use the crying
Speaker 1: emoji but accidentally hit the cry laughing emoji, which is
Speaker 1: just so sinister and cruel. But I did find one
Speaker 1: little fun celeb emoji mix up pretty recently, and in
Speaker 1: September twenty twenty two, when Queen Elizabeth is I passed away,
Speaker 1: beloved pop Diva Share included in her text a morning,
Speaker 1: I'm so proud she was a and then added the
Speaker 1: emoji for a bowl, which looked a lot like Cher
Speaker 1: was calling the leek queen a cow. Now, initially some
Speaker 1: thought perhaps she meant to use the goat emoji, calling
Speaker 1: her the greatest of all time. However, a student fans
Speaker 1: did their own like be Booby boob processing and decoded
Speaker 1: that Cher was actually saying, I'm so proud she was
Speaker 1: a Taurus because Sha and Queen Elizabeth II apparently shared
Speaker 1: the same Earth sign in the sun position of their
Speaker 1: zodiac charts. And the end of that tweet was that
Speaker 1: Sher was happy the queen had a great sense of humor.
Speaker 1: So I'm I'm sure everyone in all astral planes got
Speaker 1: a kick out of it. Cher When I die, you
Speaker 1: can call me a cow. It would be an honor
Speaker 1: anything but the thumbs up. And we're going to get
Speaker 1: to that later.
Speaker 4: There's another instance where the drooling emoji for a while
Speaker 4: there on some platforms looked like you could barely tell
Speaker 4: the drool was there, so you might think it's just
Speaker 4: a nice smiley face. On other's sort of this ridiculous
Speaker 4: cartoon eyes, giant eyes with giant pools of water coming
Speaker 4: out the corner of the lip, And if you're posting that, going, ah,
Speaker 4: this looks nice, you might not have even noticed this
Speaker 4: a little d let the corner on one phone. So
Speaker 4: there was an era where that was happening a lot.
Speaker 4: And then the last few years the companies have kind
Speaker 4: of got together and there's a lot more consistency. Now
Speaker 4: you can be a lot more confident. In the last
Speaker 4: three or so years that your emoji, it might not
Speaker 4: have the same style, or might be glossy, or might
Speaker 4: be flat shaded, but it's going to look pretty close
Speaker 4: whereas five ten years ago, well it's the wild West
Speaker 4: out there with some of them.
Speaker 1: When it comes to how they're coded, does that mean
Speaker 1: that different devices have to say, Okay, well, when I
Speaker 1: get this code in, that means this is going to
Speaker 1: pop up for it, And so we have to make
Speaker 1: sure that it's not too different so that the cry
Speaker 1: laugh doesn't look too weepy on one and have a
Speaker 1: completely different meaning depending on the user.
Speaker 2: Yes. Yeah, And I think that was probably something that
Speaker 2: was less appreciated in the earlier days of emoji. It
Speaker 2: really felt like, Okay, here are a bunch of code points,
Speaker 2: go off and design them, and I everyone went off,
Speaker 2: and they're like, I just made the most beautiful cucumber.
Speaker 2: Like everyone went often design their own emoji, And what
Speaker 2: happened was the opposite of what Unicode wanted to happen,
Speaker 2: which is that you wanted to be able to send
Speaker 2: in any language what you intended to someone else. But
Speaker 2: if I was sending you a cucumber emoji for my
Speaker 2: Android device and on your Apple device. It is a cucumber,
Speaker 2: but it's been cut up.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, depends on the context.
Speaker 2: Of why I'm sending a cucumber. Completely different things. Yeah,
Speaker 2: And noone wants to be misunderstood, and so I think
Speaker 2: in recent years there's been a real concerted effort to
Speaker 2: reconcile meaningful variances of interpretation, And the ones that were
Speaker 2: most egregious were probably the faces, because one, they're emotional,
Speaker 2: and so those are a lot harder, are like infinite
Speaker 2: Prismatic emotions are hard to capture on one image. And
Speaker 2: we're also evolved to read micro expressions, so even something
Speaker 2: that's an eyebrow that's slightly less concave then another can
Speaker 2: be interpreted differently.
Speaker 1: Speaking of misunderstood emojis, I think it's safe to say
Speaker 1: that one of the most famously ambiguous emojis we've all
Speaker 1: been there is the one with the two hands pressed together.
Speaker 1: Are they praying hands or is it a high five?
Speaker 1: Who's lying and I'm praying for closure, I'm going to
Speaker 1: high five anyone who can give it to me in
Speaker 1: this case, Keith, give us a hand.
Speaker 3: Actually, the folded hands emoji was never intended to be
Speaker 3: a high five emoji. Now that's not to say that
Speaker 3: it has never been used as a high five emoji.
Speaker 3: But if you look at this emoji's earliest designs on
Speaker 3: some platforms, take, for example, the Microsoft emoji says it
Speaker 3: actually depicts what the original name of that emoji was,
Speaker 3: which was person with folded hands. And listeners can go
Speaker 3: to Emojipedia, they can go to the folded hands emoji page,
Speaker 3: they can go down to Microsoft often that they can
Speaker 3: see all of the historic emoji designs, and what we
Speaker 3: will see from several years ago is a person with
Speaker 3: both of their hands folded their face a bit solemn,
Speaker 3: a gesture associated of course with prayer or maybe not
Speaker 3: mastee or in certain countries like Japan, like expressing thanks. Now,
Speaker 3: if you go to certain platforms and you enter in
Speaker 3: high five into an emoji search bar, it will suggest
Speaker 3: the folded hands emoji, which is one of the spaces
Speaker 3: where this possible interpretation has come from. But if you
Speaker 3: actually look at how people use this emoji, and it
Speaker 3: actually is one of the most popular across the world,
Speaker 3: high five is an incredibly niche use case. I will
Speaker 3: say this, there is really no right and wrong way
Speaker 3: to use an emoji. It all comes down to whether
Speaker 3: or not the person at the other end of the
Speaker 3: message you're sending will be able to interpret the emoji correctly.
Speaker 1: So there you have it, once and for all here
Speaker 1: on ologies. Is the emoji praying hands or is it
Speaker 1: a high five? And the definitive answer is yes. So okay.
Speaker 1: But let's get back to the early days, the growth
Speaker 1: and the spread of emoji. When did it make the
Speaker 1: jump from Japan? Because I remember I didn't get an
Speaker 1: iPhone until like two thousand and nine or something, and
Speaker 1: then I remember when my friend Micah sent me the
Speaker 1: first emoji I'd ever seen. I think it was like
Speaker 1: an arm flexing, and I was like, well, how did
Speaker 1: you put the tiny picture in there?
Speaker 4: Good emoji?
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a great emoji. But when did it start
Speaker 1: to spread culturally?
Speaker 4: So around two thousand and nine to twenty twelve, you know,
Speaker 4: it was almost like a It wasn't deliberate, but it
Speaker 4: almost had all the cues of a viral soft launch
Speaker 4: because I was sort of hidden at first, get to
Speaker 4: download special apps, and so the first time nearly any
Speaker 4: of a sort was when we had our cool friend
Speaker 4: who'd send us an emoji and he'd be like, wow,
Speaker 4: I've got to get that. And and that wasn't intention
Speaker 4: a little, It just hadn't hadn't finished making iOS compatible
Speaker 4: with Japan. So some people knew how to get to it,
Speaker 4: some people didn't. But really it was around twenty twelve
Speaker 4: when they became standardized and you could use them on
Speaker 4: theoretically every phone. And then I don't think that the
Speaker 4: idea of them being an exciting item of pop culture
Speaker 4: that we could all rally around and go I love
Speaker 4: this emoji or I like that emoji, And that would
Speaker 4: have been around twenty fourteen.
Speaker 1: I would say, do you remember when you updated your
Speaker 1: phone and had it on your keyboard for the first time?
Speaker 3: Oh? For sure.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Remember driving from Arizona to California for some road trip
Speaker 2: and a new iPhone I suppose came out and it
Speaker 2: wasn't default installed, so you had to download this other
Speaker 2: keyboard to get it to render. So that predates unicodes
Speaker 2: involvement in it. But then there's like this big gap, right,
Speaker 2: like I remember that moment, I remember using them, but
Speaker 2: now I didn't really know what an emoji you really
Speaker 2: was for a lot time. Actually, in retrospect, yeah, I
Speaker 2: don't know, like you see them in Gmail, Like there
Speaker 2: was that little lobster guy that yes animation where it
Speaker 2: shopped its clause. I just used it because he was sassy,
Speaker 2: you know, and so like that's not really an emoji,
Speaker 2: but it is emoji adjacent. But that's true of everything.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 2: You just want to like, what is this new thing?
Speaker 1: What is the difference between an emoji and emoticon?
Speaker 4: It does depend on who you talk to, but these
Speaker 4: days we tend to accept that an emoticon is like
Speaker 4: a text based character, so like the colon and the
Speaker 4: smile or the equals sign and the bracket to make
Speaker 4: a smile, that sort of thing. We did kind of incorporate.
Speaker 4: Also these custom ones on MSN. You type them the
Speaker 4: same way a lot of your listeners might remember. You
Speaker 4: would type this smile and then it would replace it
Speaker 4: with an image. Emoji tends to be this very standardized
Speaker 4: set that a committee agreed to, and they're on every
Speaker 4: keyboard in the world, whereas an emoticon could be just
Speaker 4: anything in any app.
Speaker 1: Well, one reason I've wanted to interview you forever is
Speaker 1: that you launched a psych called Emojipedia I did, which
Speaker 1: is a big deal. It is where people go to
Speaker 1: figure out what is this emoji? How are people using this?
Speaker 1: What does this mean if I get this? What does
Speaker 1: it mean if I accidentally give this? So what led
Speaker 1: you to want to create an information hub for that?
Speaker 4: I did like emoticons and emojis, and we all had
Speaker 4: the thing where we're playing with them. And I've always
Speaker 4: quite liked technology and get the latest update and see
Speaker 4: what's in there, and it was exciting one year when
Speaker 4: no one really discussed this, But Apple, you got your
Speaker 4: updated your iPhone and there were new emojis there, and
Speaker 4: like most nerds do, you go to google it, you
Speaker 4: go to have a look. This is around twenty twelve,
Speaker 4: and there's just I don't know, no one was talking
Speaker 4: about it, and I just figured that didn't make any sense. Well,
Speaker 4: like people, they weren't a phenomenon yet, but they were
Speaker 4: pretty popular. I'm like, why are there no articles listing
Speaker 4: what the new emojis are? That makes no sense to me.
Speaker 4: So it was as simple as that that it started
Speaker 4: off wanting to know what the new ones were, and
Speaker 4: so I'd go through it all list you'd compare notes
Speaker 4: for friends, or you'd find someone with an old phone
Speaker 4: and it evolved and over time. So that was the
Speaker 4: origin of emojipedia. And then I thought, well, I also
Speaker 4: want to know what they mean or what they're called.
Speaker 4: And that started a very long journey.
Speaker 1: What was the moment when you decided for it to
Speaker 1: go from an idea into something real.
Speaker 4: I've been playing around for about six months. I was
Speaker 4: working for universities at the time, setting up sort of
Speaker 4: their websites and things and trying to convince them to
Speaker 4: put emojis on their websites. It does some technical issues
Speaker 4: and they weren't very interested. So it's about six months
Speaker 4: of playing with them, and then one day I was
Speaker 4: just like, anyone can set up a website. It's not hard.
Speaker 4: It's like your ologies angel fire list. Yeah, the first
Speaker 4: emojipedia is just one page with a list of names,
Speaker 4: and it evolved from there. So I would say six
Speaker 4: months are playing around on then one night of putting
Speaker 4: something quick together.
Speaker 1: That's how it works. It kind of just like simmers,
Speaker 1: and then it.
Speaker 4: Was the name as well. I remember coming home it
Speaker 4: was my birthday. I've been thinking about the idea. We'd
Speaker 4: been out for dinner and drinks and like, emojipedia is
Speaker 4: such an obvious name. It's not doesn't take a genius
Speaker 4: to come up with it. But I've been playing with
Speaker 4: the idea of having a site that listed every emoji
Speaker 4: and what they meant. And I was just like, I've
Speaker 4: got to go in. As soon as I come in
Speaker 4: the door, I had a few drinks, but I could
Speaker 4: still navigate the computer, navigate the Internet, and I'm just like,
Speaker 4: surely this is going to be taken as a username
Speaker 4: and domain name. And it wasn't. So like, that's it.
Speaker 4: You've got a name. You have to start. You'll be
Speaker 4: so mad if six months from an hour, a year
Speaker 4: from now, someone else does this and you think I
Speaker 4: was going.
Speaker 1: To do that, How did you start to fill out
Speaker 1: what meant what? Because things can mean different things to different.
Speaker 4: People, right they can. So I learnt so much. I
Speaker 4: was an absolute novice. I had no idea when I
Speaker 4: very first started making this list that they even had
Speaker 4: an official name each. I just was like, all right,
Speaker 4: let me put each one down. And then I went,
Speaker 4: what am I going to call them? And I thought, okay,
Speaker 4: let me just check what Apple calls them, and I
Speaker 4: found you could do a text to speech thing, and
Speaker 4: I went, okay, so Apple calls them, But where are
Speaker 4: they getting that list from? And this is when I
Speaker 4: realized they'd been incorporated in the Unicode standard, which is
Speaker 4: an international standard for every text character in the world.
Speaker 4: So Unicode is inscrutable, very hard to figure out their documentation.
Speaker 4: But they had a list on their site just saying
Speaker 4: here's every emoji, and I went, oh, I'll use that,
Speaker 4: thanks very much.
Speaker 1: Who is deciding at Unicode, because I didn't know about
Speaker 1: Unicode until very recently. Who's on the board deciding what
Speaker 1: emojis exist, what they mean, what they look like. Is
Speaker 1: there one giant conference table.
Speaker 4: There is a conference table. Yeah. So the origins of
Speaker 4: Unicode are very boring, very noble, very you know, it's
Speaker 4: twenty thirty years ago. There was no way to have
Speaker 4: a document that had different languages in it yet to
Speaker 4: say this document is in Japanese, this document is in English.
Speaker 4: So you had nerds that are into text and internationalization.
Speaker 4: Very smart people came up with this standard. And then
Speaker 4: when emoji first got incorporated into this standard, you had
Speaker 4: this esoterical list of little pictures from Japan that a
Speaker 4: few random guys made up. It wasn't standardized over there
Speaker 4: it's just however made it up, and then when it
Speaker 4: became an international standard, the same people who know about
Speaker 4: fonts and technology, they just sort of by default were
Speaker 4: the people who were administering the new emoji lists. So
Speaker 4: they weren't necessarily qualified as in, they didn't have any
Speaker 4: special qualification for emoji. They were just text standardization people.
Speaker 3: So the Unicoconsortium usually just called Unicode, is an international
Speaker 3: organization that's made up of a variety of different member companies,
Speaker 3: primarily tech companies, so like Apple, Google, Microsoft, they basically
Speaker 3: create this standardization document that talks about how texts should
Speaker 3: be encoded across all digital devices. It actually originates from
Speaker 3: like the late eighties early nineties in Silicon Valley, there
Speaker 3: was discussions between Apple engineers and Microsoft engineers who realized,
Speaker 3: if various different computational devices are being constructed all across
Speaker 3: the globe, we want to make sure that each of
Speaker 3: those different devices, regardless of their manufacturer, are going to
Speaker 3: be able to communicate correctly with one another.
Speaker 2: Around thirty years ago, the Unicode Consortium was created, and
Speaker 2: every year the Unicode Technical Committee publishes and specifies the
Speaker 2: rules and the algorithms and all the properties necessary to
Speaker 2: achieve interoperability between different platforms and languages. And when I
Speaker 2: say interoperability, I really just mean you can type the
Speaker 2: letter A and the person on the other end can
Speaker 2: see the letter A or ALF or whatever letter or
Speaker 2: language you want, you know, because not just letters, there's
Speaker 2: also scripts. But anyways, now it's more reasonable that when
Speaker 2: you send the letter A from your device, the person
Speaker 2: on the other end will see the same thing. And
Speaker 2: that's what Unicode does. They basically say, here's a single
Speaker 2: character set that covers the languages of the world, and
Speaker 2: emoji are the same way. A has a code point.
Speaker 1: And what is a code point exactly.
Speaker 2: A code point is a sequence of letters and numbers
Speaker 2: that it's like the code, the code that renders any
Speaker 2: number of things. So it's the code that renders the letter. Okay,
Speaker 2: so the code for letter A is U double o
Speaker 2: F one. Oh yes, right, that's just for the capital A.
Speaker 2: There's a different code point for lowercase A, which is
Speaker 2: double oh six to one. And that's why there is
Speaker 2: a difference between a capital A and a lower case A. Now,
Speaker 2: the way that A presents itself is different depending on
Speaker 2: the font you're using. Using comic sands or using all
Speaker 2: metico what are you using? And emoji the same way.
Speaker 2: Each one is assigned a code point. So the code
Speaker 2: point for skull is one F four eight zero Wow. Okay,
Speaker 2: And every emoji has a code point assigned to it.
Speaker 1: So yeah, each one isn't a picture. It's a really
Speaker 1: detailed and colorful letter, which I feel like there aren't
Speaker 1: necessarily colors in letters and numbers, but a letter in
Speaker 1: a font having all of these details, like how are
Speaker 1: you even telling the computer how to render that?
Speaker 2: Well? I mean this is this is where it's interesting
Speaker 2: when we think of what a font is. What do
Speaker 2: you think of?
Speaker 4: Oh?
Speaker 1: I think of I feel like Sarah's san Seraf's italics.
Speaker 1: I feel like it's it has the bare bones of
Speaker 1: the structure, but then it modifies it. But I might
Speaker 1: be completely wrong.
Speaker 2: No, But that's the thing is we all come to
Speaker 2: it with a preconceived notion of how a font should operate.
Speaker 2: You can change the color, you can change the size,
Speaker 2: you can change that what it appears, you can change
Speaker 2: the formatting all the things that you just described. Now,
Speaker 2: font technology has gotten to a place where you can
Speaker 2: do more than that. You can have color fonts, and
Speaker 2: so color fonts, while not how we commonly think of fonts,
Speaker 2: is a reason why people don't know that emoji or
Speaker 2: fonts because it defies how do you think of them?
Speaker 5: You're like, no, a font is a real I wouldn't
Speaker 5: say there is a a large market for color fonts
Speaker 5: yet because they are more complex.
Speaker 2: So I think emoji are probably the most popular use
Speaker 2: case of a color font. But even with that color,
Speaker 2: you can't do things to emoji like you can a font.
Speaker 2: You can't make it aalic, you can't bold it right.
Speaker 2: So they look like pictures. So you presume it's a picture,
Speaker 2: and I think that's like a fair assumption to make.
Speaker 2: But the word is Japanese like emoji is not. It
Speaker 2: doesn't mean emotion, right, it's a picture character emoji, right.
Speaker 2: And so if you think about code points, it's the
Speaker 2: same thing. There's the picture and the character the code
Speaker 2: that's defined. So it is inherently a technical artifact. And
Speaker 2: all Unicode really does is they have a very lengthy
Speaker 2: spreadsheet of says like here are characters on a list,
Speaker 2: and this is what they mean, and this is what
Speaker 2: their names are, and this is how they map between
Speaker 2: different character sets.
Speaker 1: So does that mean let's say this Scholl one like
Speaker 1: zero f one fourteen, which, by the way, I feel
Speaker 1: like is a great longhand for one, you want to
Speaker 1: say that you are dead laughing now, yes.
Speaker 2: I really do think this is like how funny short
Speaker 2: codes work too. The time it takes to find the
Speaker 2: right emoji, you just don't so you just write colon
Speaker 2: dead colon, you know, like, yeah, you understand, or just
Speaker 2: like shock dot gift, you don't even get a gift anymore,
Speaker 2: you just like evoke the idea. Mm hmm.
Speaker 1: Okay. So Unicode does all this cataloging of emojis internally
Speaker 1: for tech, but how about cataloging them for the public
Speaker 1: at large, who's using them and misusing them? How did
Speaker 1: all the internal work of Unicode get out there for
Speaker 1: folks just kind of casually tippy tapping on pocket computers,
Speaker 1: us woozy little cows like you and me. Let's back
Speaker 1: to Jeremy and talk about the growth of emojipedia. Did
Speaker 1: people take notice of emojipedia and you? Did people start
Speaker 1: saying like, hey, what are you working on? Let's show
Speaker 1: you what we've got coming up? Or when did you
Speaker 1: start to become an authority in the field.
Speaker 4: Emojipedia kind of blew up overnight in a small way
Speaker 4: that because we started publishing lists of upcoming emojis, which
Speaker 4: I thought was interesting. One day there was sort of
Speaker 4: news had not quite leaked, but someone had said, oh hey,
Speaker 4: this and new emoji's coming out, and when you looked
Speaker 4: it up, Emojipedia would come up. And I, by that stage,
Speaker 4: had gone from treating it like a side project to
Speaker 4: taking it pretty seriously. You'd seen gone from you know,
Speaker 4: five visits a day to sort of a thousand visits
Speaker 4: a day, and then ten thousand visits a day. So
Speaker 4: this is something about a year in and then I
Speaker 4: went all right, I've got to clean this site up
Speaker 4: with it. Ah, I've done it. But it was a
Speaker 4: lot of late nights and kind of asking my friends, hey,
Speaker 4: what do you think this face? You know, I've got
Speaker 4: the official name here, but for the meaning of what
Speaker 4: does it mean? There was a lot of just me
Speaker 4: looking at it and going, this one looks the same
Speaker 4: that one, but it's a bit happier. So that would
Speaker 4: be the description for the first year.
Speaker 1: So while describing each of the emojis was challenging just
Speaker 1: in its most basic definitions With the constant evolution of
Speaker 1: emoji and culture, how does emojipedia keep up with the
Speaker 1: ever evolving definitions. Just thinking about it, it makes my
Speaker 1: stomach hurt. It causes me a sense of overwhelmed vertigo.
Speaker 1: How does an expert cope with this? I asked Keith.
Speaker 3: There is a lot of social listening involved. There's a
Speaker 3: lot of kind of data that we're pulling from various
Speaker 3: sources that we're able to do so, but also there's
Speaker 3: a lot of crowdsourcing that is involved as well. We
Speaker 3: have to be tipped off to a certain thing maybe
Speaker 3: happening on one platform versus another, and we're so lucky
Speaker 3: that we have such a global user base that's very
Speaker 3: invested in the reporting that Emojipedia does and maybe tips
Speaker 3: us off that, hang on, have you seen this happening
Speaker 3: with this emoji? And we'll kind of jump in on
Speaker 3: the beginning of an emerging viral trend. That was the
Speaker 3: case with, for example, the triangular flag emoji becoming the
Speaker 3: go to symbol for conveying the sense of someone has
Speaker 3: a red flag. You know that term where someone's got
Speaker 3: a red flag. There's a behavior that's incredibly counterproductive or
Speaker 3: a very very negative that gives people to use dating parlance.
Speaker 3: The ick that emoji had existed on the keyboard for
Speaker 3: an incredibly long time. By and large, it had always
Speaker 3: been conveyed as a little red flag, little triangular red flag,
Speaker 3: but it never really was used to convey that term.
Speaker 3: Up until one post goes viral. We get the tip off.
Speaker 3: We kind of monitor the situation. We kind of look
Speaker 3: into our social listening tools and are able to see
Speaker 3: a spike in popularity and see the change in terminology
Speaker 3: that's being used alongside the emoji. People by and large
Speaker 3: use emojis as punctuation with text, So when you see
Speaker 3: social posts, emojis are going to sit in the same
Speaker 3: place by and large that you would expect to see,
Speaker 3: say a full stop or an exclamation mark or even
Speaker 3: a question mark, and then you're able to really see, okay,
Speaker 3: this is what the topic of conversation is in relation
Speaker 3: to this emoji, and we monitor how it kind of progresses.
Speaker 3: You see this all the time as well. This saluting
Speaker 3: face emoji is another one that kind of jumped hugely
Speaker 3: in popularity recently, actually during the acquisition of Twitter by
Speaker 3: Elon Musk. As you know, people were being made redundant, left, right,
Speaker 3: and center. They were kind of signing off with a
Speaker 3: salute emoji. And what we found was that emoji quickly
Speaker 3: quintupled in popularity, and though it dropped up quite dramatically
Speaker 3: after the kind of initial forraar its popularity, it's still
Speaker 3: more than double what it was before. People almost were
Speaker 3: made aware that of this emoji's existence on their keyboard
Speaker 3: after its morality, and now it became part of their
Speaker 3: more broad emogi lexicon.
Speaker 1: Okay, so quick aside, just because this made me think
Speaker 1: about an emoji which once I became aware of it,
Speaker 1: I started using all the time. And it's this little
Speaker 1: eight bit goblin dancing thing and it looks kind of
Speaker 1: like a purple space invader, and Emojipedia told me that
Speaker 1: it's actually known as Alien Monster. I started using a
Speaker 1: year ago with my friend Micah, basically as a way
Speaker 1: of just rating how much I do or very often
Speaker 1: do not have my shit together. Like I'll say I'm
Speaker 1: at like three out of five goblins today, I'm hanging on.
Speaker 1: I'm not doing that bad. And I know we all
Speaker 1: have secret meaning ones, but the Alien Monster, it's one
Speaker 1: of my favorites it's just pixelated chaos. But what about
Speaker 1: Jeremy as the founder of Emojipedia, what's his favorite? What's
Speaker 1: his little Darlin? Which emoji do you use the most?
Speaker 4: I get bored of the same emoji, so I like
Speaker 4: a new one. The melting face has been excellent, and
Speaker 4: raising me is one of the best new auditions. I think,
Speaker 4: what do you think about it? The melting face? I
Speaker 4: just like any that are conflicting, which defeats the purpose
Speaker 4: in some ways. Every confusing one of my favorite ones
Speaker 4: that adds ambiguity in there. And the melting face is smiling,
Speaker 4: but it's melting away. I just I like that. I
Speaker 4: think it adds some realism. It's like talking in the
Speaker 4: real world. Just a plain smiley is just na boring.
Speaker 1: What about the skull for dying laughing? Do you enjoy
Speaker 1: that juxtaposition of meaning an image.
Speaker 4: I like that it exists. I first these things happen
Speaker 4: when I was running a mojipedia. I think that we
Speaker 4: saw this skull come out of nowhere. That Apple one
Speaker 4: day released a list of they're trying to shof some
Speaker 4: privacy feature, and they showed off their top ten emojis
Speaker 4: use in my message and this is a good year
Speaker 4: or two before I'd seen mainstream use of the skull.
Speaker 4: It must have been happening. It was in the top
Speaker 4: ten and I had to go, what is going on?
Speaker 4: Why are people using this? And clearly it was happening
Speaker 4: in younger communities and now it's very widespread. I can't
Speaker 4: use it myself. I feel like it belongs to the
Speaker 4: next generation. I don't think I can sincerely put the skull.
Speaker 4: What about you?
Speaker 5: Can?
Speaker 4: You can you see skull emoji laugh?
Speaker 1: I can do a skull emoji for laugh, but only
Speaker 1: when it's also very flat face, like I'm dying laughing. Also,
Speaker 1: I do want to die from this, so it has
Speaker 1: to have a double meeting, and I would only use
Speaker 1: it in very very intimate context. Probably, I wouldn't just
Speaker 1: like text a colleague or you know what I mean.
Speaker 4: Yeah, colleagues get the top five generic ones, the laugh, cry,
Speaker 4: the smile, the thumbs up, right, I think it's about it,
Speaker 4: that's it. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I feel like I used the anguish face a little
Speaker 1: too much, and I like.
Speaker 4: The English face has a lot of emotion on one face.
Speaker 1: So much, and I feel like if you had to
Speaker 1: mind my personal data to see like how my mental
Speaker 1: health is going. At certain points you would be like,
Speaker 1: she's using the English face a lot, like she must
Speaker 1: be on deadline.
Speaker 2: We all use the same ones, the same two tears
Speaker 2: of joy and heart by a large margin, like one
Speaker 2: in five emojis shared is the tears.
Speaker 1: Of joy really oh yeah?
Speaker 2: And then the red heart for obvious reasons, and then
Speaker 2: there's a long drop off.
Speaker 3: We saw a huge jump in usage over the last
Speaker 3: number of years in the loudly crying face, the emoji
Speaker 3: with these two kind of water fall esque tears running
Speaker 3: down its face, which was initially created to convey genuine
Speaker 3: sadness like absolute despondency, abject melancholy, but because of how
Speaker 3: incredibly over the topics design is, younger generations particular began
Speaker 3: to co opt it as oh my god, I'm so overwhelmed,
Speaker 3: which can also be used to say I'm so overwhelmed.
Speaker 3: Because of how hilarious this is or how cringe inducing
Speaker 3: it is, It's actually quite diverse, and of course, one
Speaker 3: thing that we've certainly seen occur in the emoji keyboard
Speaker 3: as things have evolved over the years is kind of
Speaker 3: a much wider embrace of the ironic use of emojis,
Speaker 3: Millennials and older generations by and large tend to use
Speaker 3: them in a more earnest fashion or stick more closely
Speaker 3: to their intended meaning. So if they wanted, for example,
Speaker 3: convey a sense of kind of awkwardness, they would opt
Speaker 3: for the emojis that have been kind of created to
Speaker 3: encapsulate that sensation, so the classic kind of upside down
Speaker 3: face or more recently the melting face emoji. But more
Speaker 3: and more we're seeing reports of younger generations kind of
Speaker 3: got a lot more playful when it comes to the
Speaker 3: emojis they are opting for to convey kind of a
Speaker 3: sense of awkwardness. There's a lot more kind of sargonic
Speaker 3: emoji use. We've seen reports of people using the cowboy
Speaker 3: hat emoji, for example, to convey a sense of awkwardness,
Speaker 3: because it's just so absurdly happy, and it kind of
Speaker 3: could convey in a certain context, just an awkward Okay,
Speaker 3: I've just got to go along with this, even though
Speaker 3: I don't feel it's appropriate for how I'm feeling at
Speaker 3: this moment in time, because I'm sitting here, big goofy
Speaker 3: smile on my face, cowboy hat on again. Metaphorically speaking,
Speaker 3: just having to kind of go along along with this
Speaker 3: bizarre situation I'm finding myself in.
Speaker 1: Okay. So we're going to get back into how these
Speaker 1: new uses of emoji began and how Emojipedia keeps track
Speaker 1: of them all. But first, every week we donate to
Speaker 1: a charity of the ologist choosing, and this week it's
Speaker 1: going to none other than Unicode. So the Unicode Consortium.
Speaker 1: It kind of sounds like an evil corporate empire, but surprise,
Speaker 1: it's cool as hell and it's a nonprofit. So Unicode
Speaker 1: is a five oh one c three nonprofit. It was
Speaker 1: found in nineteen eighty eight and it involves hundreds of professionals,
Speaker 1: so many volunteers and language experts who are helping create
Speaker 1: and manage standards for software that's deployed on more than
Speaker 1: twenty billion devices around the globe. And it's uniting us
Speaker 1: in language and giving greater access to expression for so
Speaker 1: many people. So thank you Unicode for allowing us to
Speaker 1: text a drooling face emoji to an X at one
Speaker 1: point fifty four am and at least be understood, if
Speaker 1: not well received. And also thank you to patrons and
Speaker 1: sponsors of oologies who make those donations possible. Let us
Speaker 1: celebrate emojis the next few weeks. It's World Emoji Day
Speaker 1: July seventeenth. How can you celebrate. You can toss a
Speaker 1: couple bucks at Unicode. I'm sure they'd use it. You
Speaker 1: don't have to because we did, but you always can. Okay,
Speaker 1: next week we'd have part two with all your questions,
Speaker 1: but for this part one, let's keep our butts at
Speaker 1: the edge of our seats. Learning the history and the
Speaker 1: basics of emojis and they're constantly evolving meaning and how
Speaker 1: does Emojipedia track them? When it comes to who's making
Speaker 1: the trends? Did you find at some point like, oh,
Speaker 1: things would start on TikTok and then they would go
Speaker 1: to Twitter and then like is there a waterfall effect?
Speaker 1: Like where does it start?
Speaker 4: As far as we could tell when we say, a
Speaker 4: couple of years, and we needed to hire data analysts
Speaker 4: to figure out what's going on. Right, Twitter was easier
Speaker 4: to mine for data, which helped us see trends in
Speaker 4: big ways. We could analyze fifty million tweets or one
Speaker 4: hundred million tweets, But it was clear from some of
Speaker 4: these reports from companies like Apple whether selectively show you
Speaker 4: stuff that was happening in private messaging. As far as
Speaker 4: I can see, It's happening in private messaging first in
Speaker 4: small communities. Small groups have a little shared I say,
Speaker 4: language or something that you use between your friends, a
Speaker 4: little fun idea for an emoji, and it spreads from
Speaker 4: one to the next. It probably moves privately to Snapchat,
Speaker 4: and then you get these blurry mixed private public platforms Snapchat, Instagram.
Speaker 4: TikTok is obviously a massive cultural hit now. You know,
Speaker 4: TikTok is setting the Internet culture now, no doubt that
Speaker 4: is where it's happening now. But at least when I
Speaker 4: was running at a Twitter was the easier place to
Speaker 4: see the trends as they hit the mainstream.
Speaker 3: And of course a lot of social media platforms today
Speaker 3: have very different genergraational demographics. I mean, I don't think
Speaker 3: it's surprising for most people when I say that Facebook
Speaker 3: tends towards older millennials to older generations in terms of
Speaker 3: its kind of active user base. TikTok is primarily gen
Speaker 3: z and you just have platforms like Twitter that kind
Speaker 3: of exists across different generations, although it deals again kind
Speaker 3: of skew millennial and older and you can actually see
Speaker 3: completely different trends between these platforms when it comes to
Speaker 3: certain emoji usage. So across the likes of Facebook, say
Speaker 3: the face with tiers of joy still absolutely rules the
Speaker 3: roost in terms of the go to emoji to convey laughter.
Speaker 3: When you go to TikTok, for example, the face with
Speaker 3: tiers of joy still crops up. Absolutely. It's still the
Speaker 3: number one emoji in the world across all social platforms
Speaker 3: and messaging apps, but it is deemed a little chew
Speaker 3: gee or cringe. Very okay, boomer.
Speaker 1: Perhaps what about emojis who's meaning between different groups might
Speaker 1: be very different, Say the water droplet emoji, which some
Speaker 1: very sweet and tender souls may use only to mean
Speaker 1: something straightforward, perhaps like your mima reminding you not to
Speaker 1: forget an umbrella because it might sweat droplet outside. Does
Speaker 1: Unicode worry about regulating that at all?
Speaker 2: I mean, you know, I sometimes choke that every emoji
Speaker 2: is a sex emoji. There's something when you're working in
Speaker 2: a vacuum. Yes, those anecdotes are really funny, and I
Speaker 2: love them and I will use them all the time.
Speaker 2: The reality is is that eighty percent of the time
Speaker 2: emoji are used, it's alongside words. So if I'm writing
Speaker 2: I'm so horny for you, and I use that emoji,
Speaker 2: there's no question about what I mean, right, Yeah, no
Speaker 2: ambiguity there at all. And if you're trying to be
Speaker 2: clay and not be so overt, then maybe, but like
Speaker 2: if you're having like a heated conversation, it won't happen, right.
Speaker 2: So one of the things I do love about emoji
Speaker 2: is that it is a parallel to how we already communicate.
Speaker 2: So think about body language or eye contact, like being
Speaker 2: what might be considered too close physically to someone is
Speaker 2: considered culturally appropriate in some parts of the world and
Speaker 2: not appropriate in other parts of the world. Or even
Speaker 2: hand gesters. Certain hand gesters are more lewde in one
Speaker 2: parts of the world than other parts of the world,
Speaker 2: and so you have to respect that culture when you
Speaker 2: visit those places of origin. And part of it is
Speaker 2: being aware, part of it is learning through experience, And
Speaker 2: I do think what is great about emoji is that
Speaker 2: they don't need to be globally universally understood. You know,
Speaker 2: there's the mate emoji, which is a drink from a
Speaker 2: couple of different places, but it basically is brown. It
Speaker 2: almost looks like a coconut the straw on it. And
Speaker 2: so if you're from Uruguay, you'd be like, I know
Speaker 2: what that is, Mattae, I love mate. Thank you for
Speaker 2: the mate emoji. You talk to someone from like Montana
Speaker 2: who has not familiar at all with mate, they'd be like, oh,
Speaker 2: there's a coconut drink. I've seen that before. You know
Speaker 2: how to use it, like I'm going on a tropical vacation. Yeah,
Speaker 2: And that doesn't mean it use it wrong. It's like
Speaker 2: they use and it was effective to communicate what they
Speaker 2: needed to say to the person they were talking to.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And this is just like the Tower of Babble all
Speaker 2: over again. Platforms like Twitter, where you have a global audience,
Speaker 2: it's really important to understand who your audience is, yeah,
Speaker 2: versus like shit talking a girl friend, Yeah, do you
Speaker 2: mean anything? I mean, I use pop prints instead of
Speaker 2: a heart to indicate, just like pet names that we
Speaker 2: have for our loved ones. People use emoji in very
Speaker 2: personal ways.
Speaker 1: Well, I wonder if there's anyone that goes by just
Speaker 1: an emoji kind of like a mononym, you know, like
Speaker 1: Sting or a Beyonce or a Zindaiya, Like, is there
Speaker 1: anyone that's just represented like prince Prince was the initial
Speaker 1: just call me by this symbol from now on, And
Speaker 1: I wonder if there's anyone doing that with just an
Speaker 1: emoji legally.
Speaker 3: Well, certainly we're seeing a lot of folks try to
Speaker 3: use emojis as a kind of unique sign off or fandoms,
Speaker 3: you know, representing their kind of topic of interest with
Speaker 3: specific emojis. I mean, you mentioned Beyonce there. The B
Speaker 3: emoji is very synonymous with emoji because of the behive,
Speaker 3: and the purple heart emoji, for example, is used hugely
Speaker 3: by fans of the K pop band BTS. So there
Speaker 3: is certain emojis that are associated with certain kind of
Speaker 3: performers celebrities. Now that's not to say that emoji is
Speaker 3: definitively theirs. Of course, the emoji keyboard is there to
Speaker 3: be utilized by all of us in whatever way we fancy,
Speaker 3: and it ultimately comes down to whether or not the
Speaker 3: receiver of a message we've crafted with a particular emoji
Speaker 3: will have interpreted as the way we've intended it to
Speaker 3: be interpreted or not. And that also comes down to
Speaker 3: whether or not that person is within the same quote
Speaker 3: unquote in group as me, like, are we both members
Speaker 3: of the BTS fandom? And will that other person know
Speaker 3: when I use a particular emoji that I'm referring to
Speaker 3: this member over that member, And that all comes down
Speaker 3: to insider knowledge based on the community we're.
Speaker 4: A part of.
Speaker 3: But that also scales up to a variety of different
Speaker 3: cultural instances. And in fact, if you explore the emoji keyboard,
Speaker 3: there's a huge host of emojis that are there that
Speaker 3: represent certain attributes and aspects of Japanese culture coming from
Speaker 3: their Japanese origins, that many people in the Western world
Speaker 3: would look at and have no idea what this kind
Speaker 3: of concept is there to represent, and that means that
Speaker 3: they may just not get used. It also may mean
Speaker 3: that they'll kind of be picked up and viewed with
Speaker 3: a new meaning in a certain context because the meaning
Speaker 3: for that group of people at the moment is not
Speaker 3: particularly explicit. And then you'd see these kind of divergences
Speaker 3: across different cultural demographics or geographical demographics in terms of
Speaker 3: how certain emojis are being used to convey different concepts.
Speaker 3: But there's also you know, emojis in their food. The
Speaker 3: animals that yes are associated with a very definitive thing
Speaker 3: in the world, but emotionally speak can be co opted
Speaker 3: to mean a different thing amongst kind of different group
Speaker 3: of people, and this can be between a couple. There's
Speaker 3: an excellent academic paper called why Pizza Emoji Means I
Speaker 3: Love You from several years ago. It talks about how
Speaker 3: couples will repurpose certain emojis between each other to kind
Speaker 3: of convey new information. It can scale up to friend
Speaker 3: groups with their group chats where they all have shared
Speaker 3: experiences their friends. They're hanging out and a certain thing
Speaker 3: happens to one member of the friend group and there's
Speaker 3: a perfect emoji there and the keyboard to be used
Speaker 3: to represent that silly or amusing situation, and that emoji
Speaker 3: becomes a shorthand to reference that situation. Or it can
Speaker 3: kind of scale up again to other different demographic groups
Speaker 3: where you're seeing emojib used to represent this concept for
Speaker 3: this demo group. You can see so many different colorful
Speaker 3: emojis be used in combination. One aler to represent sexual
Speaker 3: identity or represent sports teams, things of this kind, and say, well,
Speaker 3: I'm going to use the blue and white heart emoji
Speaker 3: beside each other represent my local sports team, or you know,
Speaker 3: the light blue heart emoji and the pigcarck emoji to
Speaker 3: represent transgender identity. These are things that people can look
Speaker 3: to the emoji keyboard to communicate. They can get very,
Speaker 3: very playful with them in there, but you know, ultimately,
Speaker 3: the beauty of an emoji and the utility of an
Speaker 3: emoji is in the eye of the beholder.
Speaker 1: And just because experts and designers are more than happy
Speaker 1: with emoji definitions being so fluid and alive, it doesn't
Speaker 1: mean that people aren't out there trying to define them
Speaker 1: exactly as possible and assign them one singular, definitive forever
Speaker 1: meaning for their own self serving purposes. And those people
Speaker 1: are lawyers.
Speaker 4: The number of defense attorneys that came to me over
Speaker 4: the years that are you serious because they're arguming us
Speaker 4: so funny? How is always the same. I never actually
Speaker 4: got called into court because they never liked what I
Speaker 4: had to say. Because what that ostensibly want me to
Speaker 4: say is that whichever emoji they're defendant put at the
Speaker 4: end of their message meant that they were kidding. They
Speaker 4: normally say something horrific or something some implication of any kind,
Speaker 4: and they go, oh, but there was a wink at
Speaker 4: the end, Your Honor, So clearly the wink means, I
Speaker 4: mean the opposite of this horrific message. Ah, I didn't
Speaker 4: really mean I wanted to do whatever I was going
Speaker 4: to say that I was going to do. And obviously
Speaker 4: I can't say in good faith that's what they meant.
Speaker 4: I mean, clearly, i'd have to say they probably didn't
Speaker 4: mean that. But at the very least i'd say, well,
Speaker 4: there's no one writer wrong answer. But they would pull
Speaker 4: up and maybe a line from emojipedia and go, well,
Speaker 4: this emoji you've said here says may imply joking or laughter,
Speaker 4: and you go, yeah, it might. It might not in
Speaker 4: this context it doesn't, but it might. So there's been
Speaker 4: other court cases where emojipedia gets brought up. It was
Speaker 4: one with Jeffrey Rush a defamation case a few years
Speaker 4: ago where emogipedia was sort of brought up to the
Speaker 4: judge and they were debating whether it's reputable or not
Speaker 4: to say, here's a reputable website, your Honor, and here's
Speaker 4: you know, the emoji that my client you and you
Speaker 4: know this is reputable, and then the other side saying, nuts,
Speaker 4: is it reputable and yeah, it's that's the thing. People
Speaker 4: want a finite answer. What does this emoji mean? And
Speaker 4: there just isn't. It's like human expression that it can
Speaker 4: mean lots of things.
Speaker 1: Have you ever had to go up on the witness stand?
Speaker 4: No, no, it was always the defense to one of me.
Speaker 4: And they do this little thing which I've never been
Speaker 4: in a position to want this. But when they do
Speaker 4: a pretty little interview, they talk to you, they pay
Speaker 4: you for your time for an hour, and they basically
Speaker 4: find different ways to ask you. This means that we're kidding, right,
Speaker 4: And then obviously an hour later of me going no, no,
Speaker 4: I mean i'd have to say that it's context dependent
Speaker 4: and do you want me to comment on this message?
Speaker 2: No?
Speaker 4: No, no, just in general this emoji? What does it mean?
Speaker 4: And I go, well, it means three different things. It
Speaker 4: can mean happy, it could mean joking, it could mean
Speaker 4: curious and so funnily enough, I never got the call
Speaker 4: back from any of these Yeah, you.
Speaker 1: Won't be needing your services after us.
Speaker 4: That's almost word for word what they would say. Oh
Speaker 4: you just would hear nothing, thank you for time, Please
Speaker 4: send us an invoice, fear.
Speaker 1: Else will they just send you an upside down smiley face? Yeah,
Speaker 1: what does that mean to you?
Speaker 4: By the way, upside down is one of the clearest
Speaker 4: is sarcasm. It's found its place on the internet. Is
Speaker 4: one of the few that most people mean sarcasm, or
Speaker 4: at the very least, Ah, I'm not feeling and I'm
Speaker 4: feeling a little bit up in my head today, or
Speaker 4: some kind of things aren't right. You know, it's upset
Speaker 4: in some way. But sarcasm is the closest word to
Speaker 4: describe it, and thankfully that one is mostly used in
Speaker 4: that way. I don't think there's as much confusion on
Speaker 4: that as say the wink or the smile.
Speaker 1: What about ones that are so passe, that are so
Speaker 1: how do they say chuggy shuggy? What about what's the
Speaker 1: most just what's the most embarrassing emoji?
Speaker 4: I mean it's got to be the laughing, crying? Yeah right,
Speaker 4: I mean both both, because when people say it's overused,
Speaker 4: it is because it is the most popular emoji. So
Speaker 4: you're going to have that?
Speaker 1: Is it the popular?
Speaker 4: Still the most popular emoji?
Speaker 1: What about the tears streaming down the face?
Speaker 4: That's definitely coming in the two of those A neck
Speaker 4: and neck depending on which platform you're on. Okay, yeah,
Speaker 4: they're both very emotive, so they're both useful. But I
Speaker 4: think it got overdone by grandparents, by meme pages, by corporateness,
Speaker 4: and I get it. It's very clear. I'm laughing at this.
Speaker 4: It's a haha emoji. But it's just you see it
Speaker 4: so much. It's hard to use. It's hard to use.
Speaker 1: Now, do you think things start in personal chats? Maybe
Speaker 1: they go to Snapchat and then they go to Slack
Speaker 1: to die?
Speaker 4: Yeah, corporate anything that makes you feel like you're a
Speaker 4: work has to die in your personal life.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's so sad. But what about the emoji that
Speaker 1: have gone so far past popular usage that not even
Speaker 1: corporate uses them anymore, or worse, maybe no one ever
Speaker 1: started using them. What about the least popular emoji and
Speaker 1: who invited it to the party.
Speaker 3: Back several years ago, it was revealed that on Twitter,
Speaker 3: the aerial tramway emoji was the least use emoji of
Speaker 3: the entire emoji keyboard on the platform, and that actually
Speaker 3: drove users to use the aerial tramway emoji to try
Speaker 3: and up its usage across the board and remove it
Speaker 3: from being relegated as the last place emoji in the world.
Speaker 3: I'm going to quote the current head of the Unicode
Speaker 3: Emoji Subcommittee, Jennifer Daniel. They've said that there's so many
Speaker 3: emojis and the emoji keyboard that you don't get a
Speaker 3: lot of love, maybe because they shouldn't have been turned
Speaker 3: into emojis in the first place. The emoji keyboard is
Speaker 3: a bit of a quote unquote junk drawer. But when
Speaker 3: you see one of those emojis, like, for example, the
Speaker 3: chair emoji, crop up, it's just a case of like,
Speaker 3: oh wow, someone's really exploring the options there. And in fact,
Speaker 3: the chair emoji was not too long ago the subject
Speaker 3: of a bit of a viral trend on TikTok where
Speaker 3: one influencer declared that they were going to use the
Speaker 3: chair emoji as a symbol for laughter, and it caught
Speaker 3: on for maybe twenty four to four eight hours, so
Speaker 3: you'd see a lot of chair emojis in TikTok comments,
Speaker 3: and of course that was incredibly confusing, and it was
Speaker 3: just a case of this influencer's following decided this would
Speaker 3: be a funny way to repurpose an emoji in a
Speaker 3: really kind of humorous and confusing manner. Now, that didn't
Speaker 3: sustain itself because of course it was based on a
Speaker 3: joke as opposed to actual utility. But even those kind
Speaker 3: of emojis like the chair, you could kind of even
Speaker 3: go like the sewing needle. There's so many different emojis
Speaker 3: that are out there that are just not getting a
Speaker 3: lot of love. But when they kind of crop up,
Speaker 3: I've never really grown. I'm just like, oh cool, someone's
Speaker 3: really really diving in deep there.
Speaker 1: Let's talk thumbs up. Why is it so passive aggressive?
Speaker 1: Why does the thumbs up get thumbs down?
Speaker 2: My feeling is the reason why people think it's passive
Speaker 2: aggressive is because the person using it is passive aggressive, right.
Speaker 1: It sums up.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's a lot of boomers, right, and their
Speaker 2: conventions are more formalized, and maybe they're being more passive
Speaker 2: aggressive than your friends, and so it's associated with that.
Speaker 2: But you can use thumbs up. You can be a
Speaker 2: cool dude glasses base and the thumbs up and be
Speaker 2: the thuns like this a super cool way of using it.
Speaker 2: It's like anything else. It's just you use things with
Speaker 2: intention and feeling an authenticity, and if it's not authentic,
Speaker 2: people can tell but just like, good job on that
Speaker 2: report thumbs up and you're just like, oh you too,
Speaker 2: you know, and so that is probably indicative of larger
Speaker 2: communication breakdowns than the thumbs up.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a great answer. What do you think is
Speaker 1: the most underused emoji? What's the one that you're like,
Speaker 1: this one even exists?
Speaker 4: Hmm. I mean there's some rubbish symbols at the end,
Speaker 4: little they stufflessly. Even in recent years, I found some
Speaker 4: of them that I was on the committee that approved
Speaker 4: a bit boring sort of I know, and I'm sorry.
Speaker 4: You've probably got quite a sciency group that listened to this.
Speaker 4: But the lab coat emoji and the test tube, I mean,
Speaker 4: they're fine, they're fine, but they get so little use
Speaker 4: compared to the faces and the flowers and the nature
Speaker 4: that they're like very job specific.
Speaker 1: Let's say, what's one that you wish existed?
Speaker 4: The emoji that needs to exist that I don't think
Speaker 4: will happen, but it does need to exist. It's one
Speaker 4: that did exist on MSN Messenger. It was an open
Speaker 4: hug from one direction and then there was a reverse
Speaker 4: one pointing the other direction. So someone sends you something
Speaker 4: sad or good news, anything you can send them the
Speaker 4: open hug, and they can send you the reverse of
Speaker 4: it to hug you back.
Speaker 1: Oh that's so reciprocal and I love it.
Speaker 4: And that needs to exist. Instead there's a boring hug
Speaker 4: of two silhouetted people hugging, and that is very corporate
Speaker 4: and doesn't make anyone feel warm and fuzzy. Some platforms
Speaker 4: make it look better than others. Google's one's a bit
Speaker 4: clearer than Apple's. But it was one of these issues
Speaker 4: of the gender and the skin tones that if you
Speaker 4: had every man, woman, non binary person with five different
Speaker 4: skin tones, you'd have suddenly had hundreds of hug emojis
Speaker 4: that are tiny. Stough, Just a.
Speaker 1: Quick aside, just a heads up that we're going to
Speaker 1: cover this topic of diversity in emojis and representation and
Speaker 1: the purposes of emojis, say versus avatars, and a lot
Speaker 1: more in part two when we return with your questions.
Speaker 1: Oh it's so good, it's so nuanced and interesting, So
Speaker 1: come back next week for that and a whole bunch more. Okay,
Speaker 1: sorry to interrupt. We're back in.
Speaker 4: Whereas back in the day, one benefit all these early
Speaker 4: platforms had they were so small you couldn't really tell.
Speaker 4: The hug emojed on MSN Messenger, you couldn't tell if
Speaker 4: it was a man or a woman, just little pixels, right,
Speaker 4: You had no idea, so you could make yourself that person.
Speaker 1: How lucky were we that there was a germ emoji
Speaker 1: that actually was a coronavirus?
Speaker 4: That was exceptionally lucky. Apple's design was the more popular
Speaker 4: of all of them. I think a few of them
Speaker 4: looked a bit different early on, but yeah, what incredible
Speaker 4: timing that became. That was briefly the top of emoji
Speaker 4: being used, just like you want to talk about this
Speaker 4: new thing. It takes over the world, and you've literally
Speaker 4: just approved an emoji for it.
Speaker 3: It was also a huge jump in use of the
Speaker 3: of course, face of medical mask emoji, which had actually
Speaker 3: existed on the emoji keyboard since the very beginning, was
Speaker 3: actually one of the emojis that was there from some
Speaker 3: of the early sets created in Japan in the late
Speaker 3: nineteen nineties early two thousands.
Speaker 1: Another popular COVID emoji the syringe and vaccinations. Do you remember, though,
Speaker 1: when the syringe used to have drops of red coming
Speaker 1: at the top. Who got to decide when the syringe
Speaker 1: stopped being a tiny blood fountain. Were you on the
Speaker 1: board when they decided to make the syringe not have
Speaker 1: blood gushing out of it?
Speaker 4: Well, because the committee doesn't decide what they look like.
Speaker 4: There's this weird dance that all the companies are at
Speaker 4: the meetings. Apples there, Google's there, you know, Twitters there.
Speaker 4: They all have their own designs, but the committee doesn't
Speaker 4: really say here's what it should look like. That goes
Speaker 4: back to probably when Apple changed the gun from looking
Speaker 4: like a real weapon into a water pistol. And they
Speaker 4: did that without consulting anybody. Ah, and fine, I don't
Speaker 4: have any I'm not I have no pro gun stance.
Speaker 4: It didn't bother me being the gun on the keyboard.
Speaker 4: I think Apple thought they were doing a good thing.
Speaker 4: I think they thought, great, we will be a responsible company.
Speaker 4: There's a gun problem in America. We will remove the
Speaker 4: gun and will redesign it, make it look like a
Speaker 4: water gun or a water pistol. And that was complicated
Speaker 4: because it meant that other phones did not do the
Speaker 4: same thing. So I could send a toy gun to
Speaker 4: you and you could see it on your phone and
Speaker 4: see a weapon. Oh, so there's a practical issue and
Speaker 4: then there's also just the other companies probably feeling a
Speaker 4: bit cheesed off, like it's Apple over here, like making
Speaker 4: it tough on us. Now we didn't do anything. We
Speaker 4: stuck with the status quo, and now they've given us
Speaker 4: an issue. Now we have to change outs on, not
Speaker 4: change ours. Like we're meeting together, why don't we agree
Speaker 4: on these things? So the syringe of the same sort
Speaker 4: of thing. I don't think the committee ever officially decided,
Speaker 4: but maybe there might have been a bit more collaboration
Speaker 4: behind the scene, maybe a little bit more just they
Speaker 4: were thinking a maybe we might bump the blood out
Speaker 4: of this, and someone else goes, yeah, me, we might,
Speaker 4: we might do So I think it's a bit more
Speaker 4: like that, a bit of wink nudge and see what happens,
Speaker 4: see what the big players do. And if you're a
Speaker 4: smaller tech company you don't have much choice.
Speaker 1: Were there any of those meetings people was just fighting
Speaker 1: sometimes me really No, I mean they're very cordial.
Speaker 4: Everyone's everyone a tech professionals, and more recent years has
Speaker 4: been a more diverse group of people, sort of linguists
Speaker 4: or lexicographers, people that bring non tech backgrounds, which is
Speaker 4: very helpful. No it never got a motive in the sense.
Speaker 4: But you know, sometimes you're just saying no Tom. You know,
Speaker 4: you're saying no torn emoji. And sometimes I would think
Speaker 4: some of the boring ones. I don't think I necessarily
Speaker 4: made a stand against the lab code or the test tube,
Speaker 4: but nonetheless some of the boring ones, I'd be more
Speaker 4: likely to say, I just I think it's fine, but
Speaker 4: is this the priority? And sometimes you go you do
Speaker 4: it in meeting ease, you know, you go around in
Speaker 4: circles and you bring it back and it gets retabled
Speaker 4: next month or next week. There's no there's no fisty
Speaker 4: cuffs on the board.
Speaker 1: Speaking of discussions about what emojis look like and also
Speaker 1: what emojis we get to have. Is it all just
Speaker 1: nerds at the big conference table having polite arguments. Is
Speaker 1: there any way that, say you or I could petition
Speaker 1: to have an emoji added? I mean, what if I
Speaker 1: and a lot of people maybe need a I'm showing
Speaker 1: up to your barbecue and the leggings I slept in
Speaker 1: hope that's cool emoji or something that connotes, Hey, I
Speaker 1: hope you had a good time hanging out last night.
Speaker 1: I'm texting you after the hang to make sure that
Speaker 1: you also thought it was a good hang. How can
Speaker 1: we get one of those emojis?
Speaker 2: There's two ways to answer this question, okay. One is
Speaker 2: Google Emoji proposal, and you'll find a website unico dot
Speaker 2: org where you follow the instructions sort of like writing
Speaker 2: a dissertation though, but it's open to the general anyone
Speaker 2: can proposal. But it's not like change dot org. It's
Speaker 2: not like write a petition and get your signatures and
Speaker 2: once you hit a certain number, becomes an emoji. It's
Speaker 2: not it's not how this works. It's it's more in
Speaker 2: the space of academia.
Speaker 1: When it comes to making new ones, who's designing them?
Speaker 1: And what is the process of actually designing them? Because
Speaker 1: I imagine we use them so teeny but they must
Speaker 1: be designed on these big monitors, right, they're like shrinky dinks.
Speaker 1: I just realized they're like digital shrinky dinks, you know,
Speaker 1: like that's it's.
Speaker 2: Well, they're okay. How do we answer this question succinctly
Speaker 2: without getting too wonky about designing fonts?
Speaker 4: Oh?
Speaker 1: We love that.
Speaker 2: I mean it's true. If any podcast is going to
Speaker 2: get wonky.
Speaker 1: About designing, yeah, get into it.
Speaker 2: So anyone can design an emoji, right, just like anyone
Speaker 2: can design a font. In terms of the process of
Speaker 2: designing an emoji, I mean they're all so different, everything
Speaker 2: from the seemingly inconsequential like what side eye the tears
Speaker 2: should be on for this, how melted should the melty
Speaker 2: face be? Or what direction should the teapot face? Or
Speaker 2: what color should that bucket emoji be? There are so
Speaker 2: many different considerations, and so phoenix okay, emoji coming out?
Speaker 4: Okay.
Speaker 2: The phoenix obviously is not a new concept. It's been
Speaker 2: around for a long, long, long, long long time, and
Speaker 2: its conventions are fairly similar because it exists in lots
Speaker 2: of different culture. The phoenix emoji appears in Greek mythology,
Speaker 2: it has representation in Asian culture, and it means all
Speaker 2: different kinds of things. Obviously, it can mean rebirth, but
Speaker 2: it also can mean love, it can mean nobility, It
Speaker 2: can mean a number of different things depending on its roots.
Speaker 2: It has roots in Egyptian culture and Slavic culture and
Speaker 2: Turkic culture, and so the phoenix had global representation because
Speaker 2: it could be found in a number of different cultures
Speaker 2: around the world and throughout history. So how that influence
Speaker 2: the design well, as you can imagine the way it
Speaker 2: looks in Chinese culture isn't exactly the same as it
Speaker 2: is in Persian culture or an Egyptian in Turkish, And
Speaker 2: so how do you design a phoenix that can represent
Speaker 2: all of those different cultures? And then generally what I
Speaker 2: do is rather than saying, oh, let's pick Slavic because
Speaker 2: they have less representation in the keyboard, which you could do, instead,
Speaker 2: what I do is I kind of don't pick any
Speaker 2: culture over another one, and I just pick a little
Speaker 2: bit of each one. And so no one's happy, like
Speaker 2: everyone's al Frankenstein in there. But the phoenix, in terms
Speaker 2: of a symbol, is iconic, right. There are certain things
Speaker 2: that we understand it to be. It's gesture where it's
Speaker 2: wings open, it's color. It's also generally because of the
Speaker 2: mythology around the phoenix, it's it's grounded in peacocks, and
Speaker 2: so the face kind of looks peacockish with the little
Speaker 2: feathers here in the shape of the beak, in the
Speaker 2: shaped neck and the rising from the ashes. And so
Speaker 2: when we were designing it, we were thinking about how
Speaker 2: it can be representative of many cultures and how you
Speaker 2: can design it so it looks glorious when it's big,
Speaker 2: but also to your point, legible when it's at twelve
Speaker 2: point size in your Google doc. Right, Yeah, you have
Speaker 2: to design it in a way where just like any
Speaker 2: letter form, like the letter A, you want to make
Speaker 2: sure that hole in the letter A is big enough
Speaker 2: to be legible. And so you do that with the shape.
Speaker 2: So the shape of the neck has enough space between
Speaker 2: the wings so that you can separate the different anatomical
Speaker 2: parts of the bird. So you're constantly looking at it
Speaker 2: big and small. You're looking at it in dark environments
Speaker 2: and in light environments, because now we've got dark mode,
Speaker 2: we got light mode, we got all kinds of different modes,
Speaker 2: and so all you could because you can anticipate where
Speaker 2: emoji will appear because they appear everywhere. They're just they're
Speaker 2: all like smart refrigerators. Now I saw one etm at target,
Speaker 2: Like they're everywhere. All you can really do is just say,
Speaker 2: like itself, it's the best it possibly can be, and
Speaker 2: where it's most frequently appearing. When designing the emoji, we
Speaker 2: obviously read the proposal, or if you're writing the proposal,
Speaker 2: is making sure it's grounded and the right literature, and
Speaker 2: you confer with experts on the subject as a designer,
Speaker 2: which is my favorite part of the job. You know,
Speaker 2: like the anatomical heart emoji was added and talked to
Speaker 2: a cardiovascular surgeon. When we were redesigning some of our
Speaker 2: marine animals, we talked to the Monoey Bay Aquarium, you know,
Speaker 2: so like I get these excuses to talk to these
Speaker 2: folks that really know the space really well and figuring
Speaker 2: out that fine line between like, you know, you don't
Speaker 2: need to design something that would go in anatomy textbook
Speaker 2: for a surgeon to reference something that is legible and
Speaker 2: useful and approachable and not terribly gory. That's where the
Speaker 2: third step I didn't really mention the first and second,
Speaker 2: but you know, it's like reading a proposal is really
Speaker 2: anticipating its purpose in a communication context, and so sometimes
Speaker 2: that means like not embracing reality, right, it means like
Speaker 2: absolutely what how will it be visually represented? And then
Speaker 2: one part that I don't think the average designer who's
Speaker 2: proposing emoji, but I do think folks who are designing
Speaker 2: emoji fonts do consider is how it works with other
Speaker 2: emoji in the inventory. You know, there's a new lime
Speaker 2: emoji coming, Like, how do you make sure that it's
Speaker 2: not just it's distinctive visually distinctive from the lemon emoji,
Speaker 2: And so you really want to evaluate and consider its
Speaker 2: purpose in a communication context and evaluate how it works
Speaker 2: with other emojis in the inventory. And then of course
Speaker 2: another aspect of designing emoji is anticipating how other folks
Speaker 2: will design it. Because it's a font, it's not a picture.
Speaker 2: When I send it to you, I want to make
Speaker 2: sure that you're going to see something meaningfully similar as
Speaker 2: to what I think. And so there isn't much room
Speaker 2: for creative freedom, honestly, right, you really have to be
Speaker 2: faithful to the original intent and it's purpose and the
Speaker 2: proposal and.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and what about the actual nuts and bolts of
Speaker 1: drawing it. I always picture those old like you know,
Speaker 1: animation studios from the twenties where they've got sketches of
Speaker 1: you know, characters we're now really familiar with. Where does
Speaker 1: it start in terms of the shape of it?
Speaker 4: I mean it can.
Speaker 2: Start from anywhere.
Speaker 4: I mean.
Speaker 2: One of our artists, Fiona, she was drawing the jellyfish emoji.
Speaker 1: But by the way, the medusologists are thrilled about that,
Speaker 1: so thrilled.
Speaker 2: We were working with a number of different students studying
Speaker 2: marine biology and they looked at all the different types
Speaker 2: of jellyfish and which one because you got to pick one? Yeah,
Speaker 2: which one is going to represent all of it? Isn't
Speaker 2: a box jellyfish?
Speaker 4: Is that?
Speaker 1: I forget the other one home jellyfish? Yeah, there's so yeah.
Speaker 2: More, you know what you got here? Right, So you
Speaker 2: really go into cartoon land and you pick something that
Speaker 2: is sort of this idea of a jellyfish rather than
Speaker 2: literal jellyfish. Anyways, she did a number of sketches around
Speaker 2: different types, different colors, different ways it could swim, and
Speaker 2: at the end of the day, you know, you go
Speaker 2: with something that feels it is emblematic and iconic, and
Speaker 2: I mean the software is not the most interesting. You know,
Speaker 2: you pro create an illustrator, but then that's just the
Speaker 2: first part. You have to make a font out of it,
Speaker 2: and then there's all kinds of font software as well.
Speaker 1: Do you remember a controversy with a squid?
Speaker 4: No? Oh, vaguely, but refresh me is there anything?
Speaker 1: It had a butt on its face and the person
Speaker 1: who pointed that out was a friend of mine who
Speaker 1: I met because I interviewed her for the Touthology episode,
Speaker 1: and she was one of the ones that was like,
Speaker 1: excuse me, I'm a squid expert, and that squid has
Speaker 1: a butt on its face.
Speaker 4: Yes, I do recall this now. And this sort of
Speaker 4: thing happens, and often it was then me often going
Speaker 4: to companies like Apple or Google and saying, hey, someone's
Speaker 4: brought this.
Speaker 1: Up, someone named Sarah mcinaty.
Speaker 4: What are you going to do about it? And often
Speaker 4: you wouldn't hear back necessarily, but you may. You may
Speaker 4: get a heads up when it gets updated to go oh,
Speaker 4: by the way, you might want to check or not.
Speaker 4: You know. In the end, we just got to the
Speaker 4: point where we just checked every update religiously, so it
Speaker 4: didn't matter, you know what emojipedia, a new Apple update
Speaker 4: would come out, Google or anything, and we would downloaded
Speaker 4: and check side by side because maybe they released on
Speaker 4: them they didn't want to tell you about it, you know,
Speaker 4: maybe it was a bit on the downloaded. The bagel
Speaker 4: people didn't like the dry bagel with no cream cheese
Speaker 4: that Apple tried to release. I get that they briefly
Speaker 4: tried to make the Peachless luscious. It was how dare
Speaker 4: and people got.
Speaker 1: Mad, so yeah, how dare?
Speaker 4: Yeah, those are fun discussions.
Speaker 1: When you're working with Unicode, when there's a discussion about
Speaker 1: what's coming up next? Are there any emoji that are
Speaker 1: on the chopping block, like no one uses the fire hydrant,
Speaker 1: like get it out of here, anything like that that
Speaker 1: you have had to stand up for an emoji or
Speaker 1: or say no, not that one.
Speaker 2: I mean, I try to kind of host conversations about
Speaker 2: it so to give people space to explore and ask questions.
Speaker 2: Some of it rhetorical, some of it grounded in actual evidence,
Speaker 2: and I try not to step in unless there needs
Speaker 2: to be something that is fact fact based or clarifying
Speaker 2: or a follow up question of some sort, and to
Speaker 2: hold ourselves accountable to our own guidelines, right, Like, if
Speaker 2: we're starting to have a discussion about something that seems
Speaker 2: to undermine a previous one or contradict something, then try
Speaker 2: to bring that up and make sure that's surfaced and
Speaker 2: appropriately addressed. Because once you add an emoji, you can
Speaker 2: never remove it.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: They're permanent. They're permanent, so there's no room for experimentation, right.
Speaker 2: It is in the Unicode standard. It is a code
Speaker 2: point and they never remove the code point.
Speaker 1: Wow. Can I ask you some questions for listeners?
Speaker 4: Yes, love a listener questions. Okay, now to the people.
Speaker 1: We have so many good ones. It is boggling, so
Speaker 1: ask smart people, colorful questions. Get ready to celebrate World
Speaker 1: Emoji Day on July seventeenth. Get pumped about it. We'll
Speaker 1: have another episode with all of your questions next week.
Speaker 1: Feel free to show this to anyone who has so
Speaker 1: many boggling emoji questions. It's part of our everyday life.
Speaker 1: I want to thank the guests who came on. We've
Speaker 1: linked all of their socials in the show notes. Thank
Speaker 1: you Keith, Jeremy, Jennifer. We'll hear more from them next week.
Speaker 1: We are at Ologies on Twitter and Instagram. I'm at
Speaker 1: Ali ward with just one L on both. Also on
Speaker 1: TikTok at Ali underscore Ologies. Thank you to everyone talking
Speaker 1: about us on Reddit. Thanks to everyone who shares the
Speaker 1: show with friends. Thanks also to people at patreon dot
Speaker 1: com slash Ologies who contribute to the show. You can
Speaker 1: also contribute your quest questions and hear what episodes we
Speaker 1: have coming up soon. Ology's merch can be found at
Speaker 1: ologiesmerch dot com. Thank you Susan Hale for managing that
Speaker 1: and so so much more. Thank you Aaron Talbert for
Speaker 1: admitting the ologies podcast Facebook group. Emily White of the
Speaker 1: word to remakes our professional transcripts and you can find
Speaker 1: that and bleeped episodes up at aliward dot com slash
Speaker 1: ologies dash extras. Also, we have smologies available at aliwar
Speaker 1: dot com slash Smologies. They're linked in the show notes.
Speaker 1: Those are shorter, kid friendly episodes you can listen to
Speaker 1: in a classroom or with your Mimasmologies is worked on
Speaker 1: by Ziegrodriguez Thomas, and Mercedes Maitland as well as Jarret
Speaker 1: Sleeper of Mindjmmdia Kelly R. Dwyer works on aliwar dot
Speaker 1: com now while Dilworth does our scheduling additional editing what's
Speaker 1: done by Mark David Christensen. Mercedes Maitland and Jarrett Sleeper
Speaker 1: took the lead as lead editors on this and did
Speaker 1: an amazing job, especially since I've been traveling the last
Speaker 1: few weeks. Love you all to bits. Also, Lauren McCall
Speaker 1: did additional research for this. So big thanks to them
Speaker 1: for so much heavy lifting on such a big episode.
Speaker 1: We'll be back next week with part two. Nick Thorburn
Speaker 1: wrote and performed the theme music, And if you stick
Speaker 1: around to the episode, I'll tell you a secret. And
Speaker 1: this week's secret is that I was just going to
Speaker 1: open my phone to tell you what my most used
Speaker 1: emochias and I realized that my phone is dead. It's
Speaker 1: only two in the afternoon. Why is my phone dead already?
Speaker 1: So I'm at like four goblins. But that's fine. You're
Speaker 1: just gonna have to wait until next week to find out. Also,
Speaker 1: when I was on Catalina Island last week teaching those
Speaker 1: climate scientists about Sidcom who are lovely, I missed a
Speaker 1: spot on my face on my upper forehead to hairline
Speaker 1: where I did not use enough sunscreen snorkeling, and now
Speaker 1: it is peeling. And so let this be a note
Speaker 1: to cuppings Textra Crush, We're all gonna die. And also,
Speaker 1: bangs do offer sun protected so don't let's not forget that.
Speaker 1: But you do whatever you like. That's the whole point.
Speaker 1: Do whatever you like. Okay, Textra Crush, if you want,
Speaker 1: ask them what their favorite emojias. Okay, bye bye,