I’m not a big emoji users. If and when I am looking for one – like a birthday cake or frowny face – I never seem to be able to find it. So I let it go. I know that some folks believe that one emoji is worth a thousand words, but I’m just the opposite. There are other ways to express “birthday cake”. Like typing in Happy Birthday. Or shorthand it to HB.
But there are a lot of emojis out there, and plenty of people – including some I text with – don’t seem to be able to have a “textersation” without throwing in one or two.
Although there are what seems like a kabillion emojis, in fact, as of October 2019, there are only 3,178 emojis in the Unicode Standard. New ones are added a couple of times a year, so there’s hope for Maggie Curry that the white wine emoji at some point in the future. But so far, no good.
Curry is the marketing director for the Kendall Jackson Wine Estate. Given that KJ is pretty much synonymous with chardonnay (at least in my mind), I can certainly understand why she’d like to see a white wine emoji.
And, jeez Louise, given that there’s a googly-eyed emoji for a pile of feces, you’d think that getting a white wine emoji added to the pack would be simple enough. There is, after all, a red wine emoji.
But so what?
If you’re a white wine drinker and you want to text a friend to invite them over to open a bottle of KJ, you’re out of luck. What’s an emoji-loving texter to do? Spell out “white wine” or “chard”?
No white wine emoji, no fun:
It can cramp your style. And when you’re left out of the conversation, it may even affect sales.
“It’s not just fun and games, emojis are serious,” Curry says. “They have the ability to have real global impact.” (Source: Boston Globe)
“Real global impact”? Curry ain’t kidding.
Used by 2.9 billion people across the globe, these little pictograms have the ability to communicate across countries, cultures, and languages. If you were to consider emoji a language, it would be by far the most popular in the world. Seven billion Facebook private messages a day are solely emoji. And 72 percent of people ages 18 to 25 say they find it easier to express their emotions with emojis than with words.
Well, we’re well past the point where all emojis do is express emotion. That was back in the day when all there was in emoji-land was a smiley face, a frowny face, and a teary-eyed face. Now we have access to, well, the poop emoji. Which I guess expresses an emotion of sorts. If ‘you’re full of shit’ is an emotion.
But what emotion is a bicycle, a firetruck, a rhino expressing?
And those 18-25 year olds who “find it easier to express their emojis than with words.” Isn’t this the gen that was raised to “use your words”? Guess that’ll have to get swapped out for “use your emojis.” [Me: frowny-face emoji goes here.]
One would think that pretty much anyone could invent and add an emoji. But, no. There’s an all-powerful committee that picks what gets added to the list.
The guardians of emoji-land are a subcommittee of the Unicode Consortium:
…. the organization responsible for standardizing languages into codes useable for computers.
Not surprisingly, the Unicode Consortium is made up of representatives from outfits like Apple, Google, Facebook and Microsoft, which meet to figure out and “agree on standardization to keep miscommunication between the different carriers in check.”
For emojis, the group is there to insure that, when I, using my Samsung phone via Verizon, add a birthday cake emoji to a text and send it to someone with an iPhone on AT&T, it comes out on their end as a birthday cake and not, say, a pile of poop.
The emoji committee meets four times a year, where they wade through detailed proposals on what should be added to the roster, and then hammer out their decisions.
And these decisions can be political. China won’t let the Tibetan flag in. Some countries don’t want any representations having to do with gay life. But the Consortium did go ahead and allow the inclusion of gay-themed emojis. (Good for them.) But when the LGBTQ+ flag was added in the aftermath of the Orlando nightclub massacre:
It was the first non-geographical flag in the keyboard and in hindsight became a Trojan horse. The floodgate to representation through flag emojis was open. Because if the gay community is included in the emoji dictionary, why should other communities not be?
The trans community is one, and they’ve been trying to get the baby blue-pink-white transgender flag included for years.
And yet, when this year’s new list rolled around, the flamingo, men’s briefs, falafel, and a yo-yo were included. But the trans flag wasn’t.
And the white wine folks didn’t even get asked to make their pitch.
Maybe it’s time to revisit who makes up the crew. Stanford computer science professor Keith Weinstein has this to say:
“If you believe emoji is an emerging world language, it shouldn’t be decided upon by a bunch of predominantly white, male, American text encoding engineers in California. That’s just not a good way to run a language.”
The Unicode folks pushed back, noting that if you want your own damned emoji you can just attach a picture to your text.
Well, that’s true about all emojis, no?
Take a picture of yourself smiling. Take a picture of yourself frowning. Take a picture of your latest round of poop? (Use Photoshop to add the googly eyes.)
Meanwhile, the transgender flag finally made it to the final list of proposals. Whether it will make the final cut for Unicode 14.0, we will have to wait and see. The white wine emoji was rejected. The committee told Curry that it thought approving a white wine emoji would open the floodgates for all different types of beverages.
Good luck to the trans-flag folks. They really ought to make the next cut. But no white wine emoji, while there’s a new juice box emoji? Sometimes life is just plain unfair.
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