Speaker 1: Texts of technology with tech Stuff from hastaff works dot com.
Speaker 1: Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I am your host,
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland, Senior writer or how stuff works dot com.
Speaker 1: And today I thought i'd cover a pair of related topics,
Speaker 1: things that many of us have had plenty of experience with,
Speaker 1: maybe don't know so much about when you get down
Speaker 1: to it, and those would be emoticons and emoji. Now,
Speaker 1: in case you are not aware, those are the little
Speaker 1: pictograms or pictures that we send through various digital messaging
Speaker 1: services and online social media in order to get certain
Speaker 1: meanings and emotional intent across to one another. There are
Speaker 1: lots of simple examples, such as the pairing of the
Speaker 1: colon punctuation and closed parentheses, which makes a sideways smiley face,
Speaker 1: though I should point out some cultures will flip this
Speaker 1: around and do an open parentheses and then a colon
Speaker 1: to be a smiley face which is flipped on the
Speaker 1: other side. But honestly, that's just playing madness when you
Speaker 1: get down to it. And there are more complicated versions,
Speaker 1: like the emoji that seemed to cover very specific moods
Speaker 1: or thoughts or concepts we humans have taken to communicating
Speaker 1: through these pictograms in ways beyond punctuating a short message.
Speaker 1: And I'm sure you've seen some messages that consist only
Speaker 1: of those pictograms, and it ends up being your job
Speaker 1: to kind of suss out what does that message actually mean.
Speaker 1: I've played that game recently myself, where everyone was using
Speaker 1: emoji to describe a movie, either by title or by
Speaker 1: the plot of the film, and then it was everyone
Speaker 1: else's job to guess what the film is. And it's
Speaker 1: a fun game to play. You think of a film
Speaker 1: that maybe is is pretty popular, like say Wizard of Oz,
Speaker 1: and then you try and describe it using only emoji,
Speaker 1: and it's everyone else's job to try and figure out
Speaker 1: what film are you talking about? And some of them
Speaker 1: are much easier than others. And again it depends on
Speaker 1: whether or not you're describing the movie or the movie's title,
Speaker 1: because sometimes the title of a film has very little
Speaker 1: to do with what actually happens in the movie. But
Speaker 1: these sort of games are becoming more and more commonplace.
Speaker 1: But where did the idea for emoticons and emoji even
Speaker 1: come from? Well, between the two, emoticons really predate emoji.
Speaker 1: They actually predate emoji by a couple of decades at
Speaker 1: least in the digital age. But obviously humans have been
Speaker 1: using pictures to communicate since prehistoric times. Now that goes
Speaker 1: well beyond the scope of this podcast. I know that
Speaker 1: I like to give the history of stuff, and often
Speaker 1: I would go way, way way back in order to
Speaker 1: start with the foundation. But even I am not going
Speaker 1: to go into talking about caves in ancient France that had,
Speaker 1: you know, prehistoric paintings on the walls. That that goes
Speaker 1: beyond even the scope of tech stuff. So perhaps we
Speaker 1: can get one of the other shows at some point
Speaker 1: to talk about the long history of using pictures as
Speaker 1: a form of communication, and I can just stick strictly
Speaker 1: to digital communication for the for the majority of this show. However,
Speaker 1: the emoticon itself doesn't date back to ancient times because
Speaker 1: processing power back then was pretty bad and it just
Speaker 1: you know, you couldn't even really get a bit together
Speaker 1: with the computers of the prehistoric age. However, there was
Speaker 1: some debate about when it first appeared, and and some
Speaker 1: people suggest that it first showed up in the seventeenth century,
Speaker 1: as in the sixteen hundreds. Now I know what you're thinking, Jonathan,
Speaker 1: You're saying frownie face. No one had a computer or
Speaker 1: a smartphone, or a tablet or a cell phone in
Speaker 1: the sixteen hundreds, extra angry face and You're right. But
Speaker 1: a twenty one century publicity manager for the University of
Speaker 1: Chicago Press named Levi Stall discovered what at first appeared
Speaker 1: to be an earlier intentional emoticon. Now Stall was perusing
Speaker 1: poetry written by Robert Herrick. Herrick was born in fifteen
Speaker 1: ninety one, and as a young man he became one
Speaker 1: of Ben Johnson's followers. He also took Holy orders in
Speaker 1: six three and became a cleric essentially, but he is
Speaker 1: chiefly known as a poet, with his most well known
Speaker 1: work being her Sperities, or the Works Both Human and
Speaker 1: Divine of Robert Herrick. One of his most famous poems
Speaker 1: is to the Virgins to make much of Time, which
Speaker 1: begins with the lines gather ye rosebuds, while ye may
Speaker 1: old time is still a flying and the same flower
Speaker 1: that smiles today tomorrow will be dying. Really cheerful stuff.
Speaker 1: But that's not the poem that specifically caught Levi stalls attention.
Speaker 1: The one that he was interested in was a poem
Speaker 1: titled to a fortune, and that was first published in
Speaker 1: sixty and the original publication actually contains the instance that
Speaker 1: Stall said this might be an early emoticon. The first
Speaker 1: two lines of that poem read as follows, tumble me
Speaker 1: down and I will sit upon my ruins smiling yet.
Speaker 1: But that smiling yet is a parenthetical. It is enclosed
Speaker 1: within parentheses. So upon my runs, smiling yet is in parentheses,
Speaker 1: and just before the final parentheses the closed parentheses is
Speaker 1: a colon, And so it looks like one of those
Speaker 1: little smiling emoticons that you would have seen in text
Speaker 1: messages for the last several years. Colon, closed parentheses, smiley
Speaker 1: face right. And as I mentioned, this was in the
Speaker 1: sixteen hundreds. So Stall's reaction was, hey, this might actually
Speaker 1: be a real instance of an emoticon, because the words
Speaker 1: immediately preceding the symbols are smiling yet. So maybe this
Speaker 1: is really a clever use of typography where the author
Speaker 1: was intentionally including the colon and the closed parentheses to
Speaker 1: indicate a smile following the words smiling yet. So this
Speaker 1: could be a very clever show of humor. However, that
Speaker 1: particular interpretation has been disputed by many scholars who point
Speaker 1: out that not only were there other instances of the
Speaker 1: colon parentheses throughout his works that had nothing to do
Speaker 1: with smiling, like they were paired with words that had
Speaker 1: no connection to the concept of smiling, but also punctuation
Speaker 1: in the seventeenth century had not really reached the level
Speaker 1: of guidelines yet. It was pretty chaotic, it was sporadic,
Speaker 1: No one had really standardized it, so it's more likely
Speaker 1: this was not an example of any sort of meaningful
Speaker 1: expression or some sort of visual joke on top of
Speaker 1: the layer of poetry. In fact, there are plenty of
Speaker 1: examples of writers from the seventeenth century using unnecessary punctuation
Speaker 1: before closing out of parentheses. There are other examples of
Speaker 1: odd punctuation that met no accepted standard that arose during
Speaker 1: the same time period, such as a comma and a dash.
Speaker 1: There was no need for a dash after a comma,
Speaker 1: but there were a lot of writers who were including
Speaker 1: this because there had not been a widely adopted standard
Speaker 1: in place. So it appears this smiley face was more
Speaker 1: of a coincidence and not actually a sly jest. And
Speaker 1: there's actually another example that predates Herrick's poem by a
Speaker 1: few years and this would be the first example of
Speaker 1: an emoji, not an emoticon. A seventeenth century notary in
Speaker 1: Slovakia apparently used a little drawing of a face kind
Speaker 1: of similar to a smiley face, although the mouth did
Speaker 1: not have a big curve to it, so it's not
Speaker 1: like a big smile. It was more like a circle
Speaker 1: like your traditional smiley face, two dots for eyes, and
Speaker 1: a little line that perhaps was a slight smile, but
Speaker 1: not an exaggerated one. The notary in question was yawn
Speaker 1: a lot of slides, and honestly, i'd probably just refer
Speaker 1: to this as a little smiley face, not even an emoji,
Speaker 1: except for the fact that this was apparently to indicate
Speaker 1: that the form he was notarizing met with his approval.
Speaker 1: So it wasn't that he was just notarizing this form,
Speaker 1: which was a town document for a little town in Slovakia,
Speaker 1: but that he was also saying, I approve of this.
Speaker 1: I'm not just notarizing it. I approve of it. And
Speaker 1: in that case it was fulfilling a function that emoji's
Speaker 1: many centuries later would continue to fulfill. So you could
Speaker 1: argue that perhaps this instant in early sixteen hundreds was
Speaker 1: the first use of an emoji. But if Herrick's poetry
Speaker 1: or Slovakian document wasn't really the origin of the emoticon,
Speaker 1: what was What could have been a speech from the
Speaker 1: sixteenth President of the United States back in eighteen sixty two. Again,
Speaker 1: that's what someone thought might be possible. They were looking
Speaker 1: at a transcript of one of Abraham Lincoln's speeches, and
Speaker 1: the passage from that speech reads like this, fellow citizens,
Speaker 1: I believe there is no precedent for my appearing before
Speaker 1: you on this occasion. Open bracket, applause, closed bracket. But
Speaker 1: it is also true that there is no precedent for
Speaker 1: you being here yourselves a open parentheses, applause and laughter,
Speaker 1: semi colon closed parentheses, and I offer in justification, and
Speaker 1: so on. The speech goes on. But that semi colon
Speaker 1: closed parentheses pairing looks like a winky face what we
Speaker 1: would usually use as a hey, do you get it? Wink? Well?
Speaker 1: Could that be the intent? I mean, the phrase that
Speaker 1: immediately precedes it says applause and laughter. It might just
Speaker 1: be a sly reference on the part of the speech
Speaker 1: writer to say, look, how clever I am. We're gonna
Speaker 1: pause for applause and laughter winky face because I'm so funny.
Speaker 1: So it could have been an inside joke. I mean, obviously,
Speaker 1: no one who's hearing the speech would have seen this.
Speaker 1: This was something that was written down on paper. But
Speaker 1: first of all, I hate stage directions and speeches like this.
Speaker 1: This is just commentary on Jonathan's part. I hate stage
Speaker 1: directions and speeches because it he suppose, is what an
Speaker 1: audience's reaction to your speech is going to be. So
Speaker 1: pause for applause or pause for laughter, or to phrases
Speaker 1: I hate to see in speeches. It is a lot
Speaker 1: of hubrists to assume that you're going to get applause
Speaker 1: or laughter at those parts. Now, if you do get
Speaker 1: those responses, you need to know how to ride them
Speaker 1: out when you're giving a public presentation, so that you
Speaker 1: can wait until it crests and as it begins to
Speaker 1: die down, you can pick back up with your speech
Speaker 1: and people will not miss what you have to say.
Speaker 1: But there's nothing more awkward then watching a public presentation
Speaker 1: where clearly there was a stage direction to pause for
Speaker 1: some audience reaction and there's no reaction. It's just you know,
Speaker 1: you might as well have that cricket sound effect playing
Speaker 1: in the background terribly awkward. So, if in fact was
Speaker 1: an intentional emoticon, it was incredibly bold to suggest that
Speaker 1: I am so clever that clear people are going to
Speaker 1: laugh winky face. More importantly, most scholars think it probably
Speaker 1: was either a typo or it was a late example
Speaker 1: of that wanton punctuation I had mentioned about the seventeenth century. Uh,
Speaker 1: it may very well have just been one of those
Speaker 1: elements where that was kind of a a habit on
Speaker 1: behalf of the person who was writing the speech. Not
Speaker 1: an indicator that this was an emoticon, but rather when
Speaker 1: they would close out of parentheses, they would put in
Speaker 1: this semicolon and then close parentheses, because that's the kind
Speaker 1: of stuff we used to see a couple hundred years earlier.
Speaker 1: The the point being that we cannot be sure this
Speaker 1: was an intentional effort to put in some sort of
Speaker 1: emotional intent within a written document, although it doesn't stop
Speaker 1: people from sometimes citing it as one of the earliest
Speaker 1: uses of emoticons. Now there is at least one nineteenth
Speaker 1: century occurrence that was clearly intentional. It really was an emoticon,
Speaker 1: not necessarily the way we use them today, but that
Speaker 1: is exactly what it was, because we're told that's what
Speaker 1: it is. This was back in one there was a
Speaker 1: satirical magazine in the United States called Puck. Puck was
Speaker 1: essentially what the Onion is today. It was satire and
Speaker 1: it was meant to poke fun at different institutions and traditions.
Speaker 1: So this was fully with that intent. There was a
Speaker 1: piece titled typographical Art and it stated that the printing
Speaker 1: press was now capable of creating expressions that rivaled those
Speaker 1: made by cartoonists. This was sort of like any other
Speaker 1: article in a satire. It was meant to make a
Speaker 1: ridiculous claim and then provide evidence that in no way
Speaker 1: really supports that claim. It's very flimsy evidence, but that's
Speaker 1: where the humor is right. So specifically, article states, we
Speaker 1: wish it to be distinctly understood that the letter press
Speaker 1: department of this paper is not going to be trampled
Speaker 1: on by any tyrannical crowd of artists in existence. We
Speaker 1: mean to let the public see that we can lay
Speaker 1: out in our own typographical line all the cartoonists that
Speaker 1: ever walked for fear of startling the public. We will
Speaker 1: give only a small specimen of the artistic achievements within
Speaker 1: our grasp by way of a first installment. The following
Speaker 1: are from studies and passions and emotions. Then underneath this
Speaker 1: little paragraph there's a sequence of four different images that
Speaker 1: are made up of letter press symbols like parentheses and dashes,
Speaker 1: but they are oriented so that you can make vertical faces.
Speaker 1: They're not turned on their side the way emoticons would
Speaker 1: be later on. They're up and down, not left and right. Uh,
Speaker 1: and you know, they just make very primitive looking face
Speaker 1: says Underneath each face was a labeled to express what
Speaker 1: the emotion behind that face was supposed to be. So
Speaker 1: you had things like um, joy, melancholy, indifference, and astonishment,
Speaker 1: and it was all just very simple shapes. The joke
Speaker 1: being that the people in the letter press department are saying,
Speaker 1: we can show off just as much artistic integrity as
Speaker 1: your greatest cartoonists. So don't think you can walk all
Speaker 1: over us, because our job is to set letters within
Speaker 1: a printing press in order to create these copies of
Speaker 1: the magazine. So it's a joke just saying we can
Speaker 1: do what you can do. But clearly the actual evidence
Speaker 1: was uh, severely lacking as far as subtlety or art
Speaker 1: is concerned. Those images do not in a regular use
Speaker 1: at this point. Remember this is predating things like typewriters.
Speaker 1: This is still putting movable type onto a press and
Speaker 1: then closing the press down. So typewriters and and the such,
Speaker 1: we're not really accessible by your general public at this time.
Speaker 1: So what about the smiley face itself? When did that
Speaker 1: become a symbol for happiness? Despite these early examples, it
Speaker 1: had not reached widespread adoption, and it appeared pretty late
Speaker 1: on the scene. It didn't happen the way it was
Speaker 1: shown in the film Forrest Gump. So there was no
Speaker 1: cross country jogger involved. There were no giant puddles of mud,
Speaker 1: there was no passing truck to splash anybody. None of
Speaker 1: that had anything to do with the invention of the
Speaker 1: traditional smiley face. That actually came out of a pr campaign.
Speaker 1: There was an add creator by the name of Harvey
Speaker 1: ross Ball, and he designed the smiley face. He was
Speaker 1: working on a campaign to help improve employee morale at
Speaker 1: an insurance company in the wake of several tumultuous at
Speaker 1: positions and mergers that the company had just been through,
Speaker 1: so employees were feeling stressed out, frustrated, nervous about their fate,
Speaker 1: and the company wanted to try and turn things around
Speaker 1: by creating a campaign of positivity. It took Ball about
Speaker 1: ten minutes to come up with the smiley face design,
Speaker 1: which included the yellow background, the slightly strange oval like
Speaker 1: eyes like they're not quite the same size and orientation,
Speaker 1: and then the not completely perfect, uh, parabolic arc that
Speaker 1: is the smile. There's a little bit of imperfection there
Speaker 1: that's purposefully put there, and it adds to the charm.
Speaker 1: All of that was Ball's design. It took him about
Speaker 1: ten minutes. He was paid the princely sum of forty
Speaker 1: five dollars for his design, and neither he nor State
Speaker 1: Mutual Life Assurance Company bothered to copyright or trademark the design. Uh.
Speaker 1: The rest of the story ends up being kind of
Speaker 1: less happy, but you know, let's tell it anyway. Because
Speaker 1: there was no copyright or trademark protection on the design,
Speaker 1: it was free for anyone to grab and use for themselves.
Speaker 1: There's nothing to prevent them from doing this. And in
Speaker 1: the nineteen seventies, two brothers named Murray and Bernard Spain
Speaker 1: decided that they wanted to use this image. They appropriated
Speaker 1: it and they used it in their own business. They
Speaker 1: were owners of a couple of different Hallmark card shops
Speaker 1: in the Philadelphia area, so they took the design and
Speaker 1: they added a phrase have a happy day, not have
Speaker 1: a nice day, but have a happy day, and they
Speaker 1: added that to the smiley face, and then they applied
Speaker 1: for a copyright, which they received, So they got a
Speaker 1: copyright that was on a design that in part was
Speaker 1: not theirs, that wasn't their creation, So they were able
Speaker 1: to copyright this design and use it for themselves. They
Speaker 1: also made a mint off of it because they were
Speaker 1: selling buttons and cards and shirts all with this logo
Speaker 1: and slogan on it, and it was incredibly popular during
Speaker 1: the nineteen seventies. Meanwhile, over in Europe, in France to
Speaker 1: be specific, there was a journalist named Franklin lou Frani
Speaker 1: who registered the smiley face mark for commercial use in Europe.
Speaker 1: He would use it to indicate news stories with an
Speaker 1: uplifting tone in a paper in France called Francis. He
Speaker 1: also was able to leverage this into a merchandizing boom.
Speaker 1: He called his design smiley, and he was selling all
Speaker 1: sorts of stuff like T shirts throughout Europe with the
Speaker 1: the image on it. One could argue, however, that his
Speaker 1: use of the smiley face to indicate items that were
Speaker 1: of good news in papers was similar to what emoticons
Speaker 1: would be used for today, So perhaps this counts as
Speaker 1: an early emoji. But let's get to the official birth
Speaker 1: of the emoticon itself as we think of it today.
Speaker 1: This actually dates to the nineteen e e d s
Speaker 1: in a computer lab at Carnegie Melon University. It's amazing
Speaker 1: that we can actually track down the birth of the
Speaker 1: emoticon as it is used today. Often these sort of
Speaker 1: things end up being buried in legend and lore, and
Speaker 1: we never really understand where something came from. It just
Speaker 1: we can kind of point when it became popular, but
Speaker 1: anything before that tends to be a mystery. Not so
Speaker 1: in this case, because things that existed online have a
Speaker 1: habit of sticking around, even if that online was just
Speaker 1: online in the case of a of a local network
Speaker 1: and not the Internet at large. Because we're talking about
Speaker 1: most universities didn't have access to the Internet. Carnegie Melon
Speaker 1: is probably an exception to that. But this was not
Speaker 1: a Internet meme. This was very local on a bulletin
Speaker 1: board system. So we can pinpoint the date of emoticon
Speaker 1: creation two September nineteen ninety two. So here's what was
Speaker 1: happening computer science students and other students who had become
Speaker 1: interested in computers. Uh, we're using a school electron bullet
Speaker 1: electronic bulletin board system or BBS to post messages to
Speaker 1: one another. So this was a predecessor to the news
Speaker 1: groups and forums that you would find over the Internet,
Speaker 1: but this would be a decade before the World Wide
Speaker 1: Web ever existed. To access a BBS, typically you would
Speaker 1: use a dial up modem and you would call a
Speaker 1: phone number that would be connected to a specific computer
Speaker 1: that hosted the bulletin board system. Some of these bulletin
Speaker 1: board systems could only have one connection at a time,
Speaker 1: so you might try and call and get a busy
Speaker 1: signal and you'd have to wait and try and call later.
Speaker 1: You also had a lot of bolletin board systems that
Speaker 1: tried to regulate traffic by charging per minute of use,
Speaker 1: and that way you could cut down on someone just
Speaker 1: hogging the bulletin board system just for him or herself.
Speaker 1: But it was again like a precursor to what the
Speaker 1: Internet would be. It was local, it was not the
Speaker 1: entire network of networks. There was, however, a different problem
Speaker 1: besides just how do you access this information? And that
Speaker 1: problem was in miscommunication. It's a problem that still persists
Speaker 1: to this day. In fact, as has always been the case,
Speaker 1: some folks would post messages or responses that were intended
Speaker 1: to be a joke, to be humorous. But when you
Speaker 1: just post text, as all of you know, you have
Speaker 1: no benefit of tone or facial expression or body language.
Speaker 1: None of those other elements of communication are present, and
Speaker 1: so sometimes it's difficult to suss out which messages are
Speaker 1: being cheeky or humorous versus which ones are being serious
Speaker 1: or sincere or outright insulting on purpose. It could be
Speaker 1: hard to determine what is what. That would lead to
Speaker 1: misunderstanding and misinterpretations. Sometimes that would completely derail any sort
Speaker 1: of discussion about whatever the topic was until someone was
Speaker 1: able to get everything back on track. So, in other words,
Speaker 1: it was creating a frustrating environment in which time would
Speaker 1: be wasted on stuff that really wasn't that important. And
Speaker 1: that's when a student stepped in. Uh, it was the thirties,
Speaker 1: thirty years old at the time. His name is Scott Falman,
Speaker 1: and Scott Falman would come up with a solution to
Speaker 1: this problem. Now. I'll talk more about that in just
Speaker 1: a second, but first let's take a quick break to
Speaker 1: thank our sponsor. Falman himself has said that he wasn't
Speaker 1: the only person to suggest the use of some form
Speaker 1: of indicator that showed intent, that showed emotional intent behind messages,
Speaker 1: so that people could know how to interpret any given message,
Speaker 1: particularly ones that are jokes, so they don't mistake it
Speaker 1: for some sort of genuine request or statement. But there
Speaker 1: was a group that had been advocating for some sort
Speaker 1: of system that would either tell you a message was
Speaker 1: serious or wasn't serious. According to Falman himself, about half
Speaker 1: of the group were seriously suggesting that approach, and the
Speaker 1: other half were kind of making a joke, thus illustrating
Speaker 1: the need for the system in the first place, because
Speaker 1: not even everybody who was saying we need this actually
Speaker 1: meant it. Some of them were joking about it, so
Speaker 1: I guess it was hard to tell since they hadn't
Speaker 1: invented emoticons yet. There were several competing ideas that were
Speaker 1: put forward to indicate tone and intent, and Falman was
Speaker 1: the one who said that you should use two different
Speaker 1: sets of marks to indicate what the message is all about.
Speaker 1: So you would use a colon dash and closed parentheses
Speaker 1: combination to indicate a joke that would be the smiley
Speaker 1: face the sideway smiley face, or a colon dash open
Speaker 1: parentheses to indicate a serious post that would be the
Speaker 1: frownie face. It didn't take much time at all before
Speaker 1: people started using the frownie face not to indicate serious posts,
Speaker 1: but instead to indicate displeasure or frustration or anger. So
Speaker 1: very quickly they began to appropriate that frownie face for
Speaker 1: a purpose that was different than what was originally intended.
Speaker 1: But it made sense because being serious doesn't necessarily mean
Speaker 1: frownie face, right, You can be serious without being sad
Speaker 1: or upset. Uh. They wanted to use that more as
Speaker 1: an indicator that this is something that they do not like.
Speaker 1: And so that's how that's how it came to mean
Speaker 1: what it meant. It's the way people use It doesn't
Speaker 1: matter what you intended when you created it, it matters
Speaker 1: how the people used it. So creators in general find
Speaker 1: this really frustrating when they make something and then their
Speaker 1: audience ends up interpreting it differently or using it differently
Speaker 1: than the way they had intended the creators. That is
Speaker 1: the way the creators had intended, but that becomes the
Speaker 1: right way to use it if enough people do it,
Speaker 1: and that becomes the accepted way to use it. It
Speaker 1: doesn't really matter what the creator originally intended. And it's
Speaker 1: a very frustrating thing to come to grips with if
Speaker 1: you are a creator, because you had a very specific
Speaker 1: use case in mind when you were going about your
Speaker 1: creative process, and then people go and muck it all
Speaker 1: up by doing their own thing. Um, but that's life.
Speaker 1: The system saw widespread adoption at Carnegie Melon and eventually
Speaker 1: it found its way to bbs IS at other colleges
Speaker 1: and universities and spread from there. So the concept of
Speaker 1: emoticons was going strong and was going viral. Well before
Speaker 1: the average person was using text messaging or instant messaging.
Speaker 1: Not many people had any sort of cellular phone, and
Speaker 1: text messages wasn't that really wasn't a thing yet, but
Speaker 1: people were starting to pick up on this concept for
Speaker 1: electronic messaging. Falman notes that many different variations of those
Speaker 1: two basic smiles, including noseless versions, the ones that would
Speaker 1: leave out the dash so you just have the colon,
Speaker 1: and the open or closed parentheses. Those would appear over
Speaker 1: the following years. Sometimes it was just an exercise someone
Speaker 1: undertook to find clever ways to make recognizable images using
Speaker 1: a limited set of typography, sort of as key art
Speaker 1: in a way, and some people would just see what
Speaker 1: sort of creative, complicated images they could make using all
Speaker 1: these different set uh icons or set symbols. Falman noted
Speaker 1: that the three sequences that were the most common that
Speaker 1: stuck around, no matter what other ones people might create
Speaker 1: were the smiley face, the frowny face, and the winky face,
Speaker 1: which of course uses a semicolon instead of just a
Speaker 1: colon in order to make it look like one of
Speaker 1: the eyes is winking. Those were the three that he
Speaker 1: said would get the most used, and other ones might
Speaker 1: pop up now and again as a joke or as
Speaker 1: a clever way of showing how someone had come up
Speaker 1: with a new way to indicate a particular image, but
Speaker 1: they didn't stick around as much as for the term
Speaker 1: emoticon that rose sometime in the early to mid nineteen eighties,
Speaker 1: but I could find no citation that pointed to the
Speaker 1: origin of the word itself. Now we know that the
Speaker 1: word comes from the combination of the words emotion and icon.
Speaker 1: That's what emoticon comes from. It's the blending of those
Speaker 1: two words. But we don't know who first coined it,
Speaker 1: or at least I couldn't find any reputable source that
Speaker 1: explained who first thought of calling these things emoticons. But
Speaker 1: I think most people can easily understand how they come
Speaker 1: in handy to help a recipient get the gist of
Speaker 1: your intention. When you delivered a message, people understand the
Speaker 1: use of it, even if they think that they're kind
Speaker 1: of silly. You can't deny that it helps understand tone
Speaker 1: and emotion if it's paired with another message. In person,
Speaker 1: we use body language, we use facial expressions, we use
Speaker 1: tone in order to get these subtle meanings across. So
Speaker 1: we do this with our face to face communication all
Speaker 1: the time. It only makes sense to create a system
Speaker 1: to incorporate that in our textual communication, Otherwise we lose
Speaker 1: an enormous amount of information that normally would be communicated
Speaker 1: between two people if they were face to face. So
Speaker 1: I don't want to mention say that emoticons are the
Speaker 1: end all be all of communication, but they I think
Speaker 1: they definitely have their use and they can really help
Speaker 1: cut down on misunderstanding s, particularly when it comes to
Speaker 1: doing things like posting jokes. Now, they also were more
Speaker 1: useful than just language, because if you think about old
Speaker 1: text messaging, you were limited to a hundred forty characters
Speaker 1: or so a little bit more than that. Actually, hundred
Speaker 1: forty I chose because that's Twitter, but obviously you know
Speaker 1: with text messages it's a little bit more than that.
Speaker 1: The problem with that is if you make a statement
Speaker 1: and then you have to explain the emotional intent behind
Speaker 1: that statement, it might double or triple the length of
Speaker 1: the message you need to send, which means you either
Speaker 1: have to send it in groups of messages so that
Speaker 1: people understand what you meant when you texted what you texted,
Speaker 1: or you could use an emoticon, which sums it up
Speaker 1: in a very simple picture made up of these, you know,
Speaker 1: bits of typographical symbols. So for the sake of brevity
Speaker 1: and being able to get across that intent within the
Speaker 1: constraints of digital information, it made a lot of sense.
Speaker 1: So as cellular phones became popular, people began to adopt
Speaker 1: the use of emoticons more and more. It was a
Speaker 1: convenient way to get that meaning across. It was also
Speaker 1: helpful if you wanted to express an emotional reaction to
Speaker 1: something but words just didn't seem adequate. Maybe it would
Speaker 1: seem trite or just not the right response. I've had
Speaker 1: plenty of situations where I would text a smiley face
Speaker 1: to somebody instead of saying something like that makes me happy,
Speaker 1: because seeing a text that says that makes me happy
Speaker 1: seems a little off putting to me. I can't even
Speaker 1: put into words why. But if I get a thing,
Speaker 1: if I get a message that says that makes me happy,
Speaker 1: because there's no tone, there's no body language, there's no
Speaker 1: facial expression. It feels like something a serial killer might
Speaker 1: send to me because it's so flat in text. But
Speaker 1: a smiley face that says it all. I get it.
Speaker 1: You're you're approving, you're smiling, You're happy at the thing
Speaker 1: I just said, Uh, the same thing was sad. You know,
Speaker 1: Sometimes saying I am sad for you or it just
Speaker 1: doesn't quite work and sending the picture people get the
Speaker 1: idea of this is the emotion I am experiencing when
Speaker 1: I see the message you have sent to me. One
Speaker 1: thing I find really interesting is how emoticons have evolved
Speaker 1: in different regions. So in the West here in the
Speaker 1: United States and Canada and Europe, the style tends to
Speaker 1: follow Falman's example with all the expressions turned to the side,
Speaker 1: so you have to cock your head ninety degrees to
Speaker 1: see the faces upright because everything's sideways. Colon open parentheses
Speaker 1: are closed parentheses. Sometimes you might see people swap the
Speaker 1: order around because usually it would go top to bottom
Speaker 1: by reading left to right. So again the lander the eyes,
Speaker 1: and the closed parentheses, for example, would be the smiling lips,
Speaker 1: so that's top to bottom, left to right. Some people
Speaker 1: would swap that where they go right to left for
Speaker 1: top to bottom. They're crazy and you probably shouldn't trust them,
Speaker 1: but they would do it the opposite way. But still
Speaker 1: you would have this horizontal alignment instead of vertical for
Speaker 1: the faces. But that's not the way it is all
Speaker 1: over the world. In other parts of the world, you
Speaker 1: would find a vertical representation. In Japan, that's the kind
Speaker 1: of emoticons they would use. Now, this particular style is
Speaker 1: still emoticons and they were called carol moji uh. This
Speaker 1: style used a few more symbols than the Western versions did,
Speaker 1: largely because the Japanese digital keyboards had to have a
Speaker 1: lot more symbols in order to get across the written
Speaker 1: language of Japanese, so they had a lot of different
Speaker 1: symbols to work with, and they could build out images
Speaker 1: that look like upright faces. It also ended up indicating
Speaker 1: the elements of a face that are more important for
Speaker 1: reading emotion in the Japanese culture as opposed to the
Speaker 1: Western culture. In Western culture, the emphasis is on the mouth.
Speaker 1: Is it a smile, Is it a frown? Is it indifference?
Speaker 1: By the mark of just a straight line. Those are
Speaker 1: typical for the Western depictions of emotion, But in Japan
Speaker 1: the eyes are more important. So if the eyes are
Speaker 1: positioned in a in a high position, it tends to
Speaker 1: express joy. So you build out this little image using
Speaker 1: these various symbols that are grouped together, and some of
Speaker 1: the symbols are representing eyes. If they're in a high position,
Speaker 1: that would mean happiness. You could also choose different images
Speaker 1: for the mouth that would indicate a smile or a
Speaker 1: laugh or something along those lines. Symbols that made the
Speaker 1: eyes look like they were clinched shut, such as the
Speaker 1: less than and greater than signs. Those could be used
Speaker 1: to show displeasure that you're you're scrunching your eyes closed
Speaker 1: because you're not happy. So again, the eyes are more
Speaker 1: important here than the mouth would be. Also, because they
Speaker 1: had more symbols, they could use lots of different shapes
Speaker 1: like stars and hearts and things like that that were
Speaker 1: kind of in webb ding or wing ding styles in
Speaker 1: order to indicate or or to increase the number of
Speaker 1: expressions that they can make with emoticons. The adoption of
Speaker 1: the cell phone and later the smartphone was really off
Speaker 1: the charts in Japan. Japanese cultures flocked to cell phone
Speaker 1: technology faster than you saw and other parts of the world,
Speaker 1: and partly because of those limitations of that technology, you
Speaker 1: started seeing more use of emoticons in text messaging because
Speaker 1: again it allows you to get across these emotional feelings
Speaker 1: without having to spell everything out. But these style of
Speaker 1: pictograms all had one thing in common. They consisted of
Speaker 1: various symbols grouped together to create a similacrum of an emotion. So,
Speaker 1: in other words, it's not really a smiley face. It's
Speaker 1: a colon and a closed parentheses, so it's two different
Speaker 1: symbols that together kind of look like a smiley face.
Speaker 1: That's an emoticon. Emoticons are made up of individual symbols
Speaker 1: that collectively appear to make a picture. Later you would
Speaker 1: get the birth of the emoji. These are actual pictures
Speaker 1: things like a smiley face. It's not a representation of
Speaker 1: a smiley face. It's an actual smiley face. And as
Speaker 1: the difference between an emoji and an emoticon, they are
Speaker 1: not interchangeable. Emoticons are made up of individual symbols that
Speaker 1: have been grouped together to make a better picture or
Speaker 1: a bigger picture, I should say, and emoji are actual
Speaker 1: images that have been crafted for the purpose of digital distribution. Now,
Speaker 1: before I dive into this topic, I want to give
Speaker 1: a shout out to an uh AN author and a
Speaker 1: researcher named Vivian Evans. He's got an upcoming book titled
Speaker 1: The Emoji Code, and Mr Evans Publishers sent me an
Speaker 1: advanced copy of this book, so I used it as
Speaker 1: one of my primary research sources for this episode, specifically
Speaker 1: about emoji. Became in very handy, So if you see
Speaker 1: the emoji code available. I believe it goes on sales
Speaker 1: starting in August of this year. Uh, it's very interesting.
Speaker 1: It has a lot to do about emoji and about
Speaker 1: language and communication and psychology. It's got a lot of
Speaker 1: different topics wrapped up in it, not just the history
Speaker 1: and UH and and social use of emoji, but really
Speaker 1: the psychological elements of language and communication and what separates
Speaker 1: a language from a code. So check that out. But
Speaker 1: to start with what exactly is an emoji? Well, the
Speaker 1: word again is a combination of different words. Emoticon was
Speaker 1: emotion and icon. Now with emoji, we're talking about Japanese words.
Speaker 1: The e means picture and moji essentially means written character,
Speaker 1: so picture written character altogether. Unlike emoticons, which represented stuff
Speaker 1: by using common symbols, these are actual designs, little drawing,
Speaker 1: small pictures of whatever it was you wanted to send,
Speaker 1: so there is a difference. There are plenty of programs
Speaker 1: that today will automatically convert emoticons into emoji, So with
Speaker 1: a lot of different messaging systems or social media platforms,
Speaker 1: if you were to do the colon closed parentheses instead
Speaker 1: of seeing that emoticon, it will automatically convert it into
Speaker 1: a smiley face emoji. Uh. Different programs will stylize this
Speaker 1: in different ways, So depending upon which platform you're using,
Speaker 1: it might appear like a smiley face in one design,
Speaker 1: and if you're in a totally different platform, it could
Speaker 1: look like a smiley face of a completely different design.
Speaker 1: But in both cases you understand what the underlying message is.
Speaker 1: They might look different because they are different instances of
Speaker 1: the same idea, but you link it back to whatever
Speaker 1: that core idea was. So for example, if I used
Speaker 1: Google and I was sending a smiley face, and a
Speaker 1: lot of those Google messaging systems, the smiley face would
Speaker 1: come across as a little smiling Android because that's the
Speaker 1: Google mobile operating system. But other systems might just have
Speaker 1: a more traditional yellow smiley face, and others might have
Speaker 1: it keyed directly into whatever their user interface looks like,
Speaker 1: so that it it matches the rest of the design
Speaker 1: of whatever me a platform or messaging system you're using.
Speaker 1: Emoji first debuted in Japan in the nineteen nineties. At
Speaker 1: that time, Japan was developing a mobile phone internet platform,
Speaker 1: which was the precursor to the mobile sites that you
Speaker 1: might encounter today when use a smartphone to browse the web.
Speaker 1: Emoticons have been incredibly popular on cellular phones, and emoji
Speaker 1: were seen as the next step. The Japanese company in
Speaker 1: T T. DoCoMo was working on building this platform and
Speaker 1: incorporated emoji into the user interface. In the beginning, there
Speaker 1: were one hundred seventies six emoji characters available. Today there's
Speaker 1: more than fifteen hundred variations that allow for different skin
Speaker 1: tones for different faces and also to more accurately represent
Speaker 1: the variety of features that humans can possess. Not to mention,
Speaker 1: there are a ton of emojis for inanimate objects, for animals,
Speaker 1: for countries. There's an enormous number of them now. The
Speaker 1: rise of the emoji in the West really began in
Speaker 1: September of two thousand eleven. That's about how long it
Speaker 1: took for smartphone penetration to really reach a height in
Speaker 1: the United States. By then, they had become consumer electronics.
Speaker 1: You gotta keep in mind that before two thousand seven,
Speaker 1: most smartphone owners were either bleeding edge tech adopters or
Speaker 1: they were business executives who were using smartphones as personal
Speaker 1: digital assistants, and no one else really needed a smartphone.
Speaker 1: They weren't. The mobile web wasn't good enough, and the
Speaker 1: interfaces for smartphones weren't intuitive enough for them to really
Speaker 1: make a break into the consumer market. But then that
Speaker 1: little company called Apple came along and introduced the iPhone,
Speaker 1: and they really designed an amazing interface for smartphones. It's
Speaker 1: not necessarily what I would have wanted. I mean, I
Speaker 1: never bought an iPhone, but it did make using the
Speaker 1: smartphone sexy and easy to understand. And by smartphones had
Speaker 1: been dominating the market enough where emoji started to show
Speaker 1: up on various digital keyboards, so it became common enough
Speaker 1: to warrant a new approach to expressing emotion online. As
Speaker 1: Evans points out in his book, the Rise of the
Speaker 1: Emoji has also led to a decline in certain abbreviations
Speaker 1: like l O, l j K, and OMG, which stand
Speaker 1: for laugh out loud, just kidding, and oh my God.
Speaker 1: Those used to be ubiquitous across the internet and across
Speaker 1: the web, but now because of emojis, they are used
Speaker 1: less frequently. People will use an emoji that's associated with
Speaker 1: those abbreviations to get that feeling across, and some programs
Speaker 1: will automatically translate those abbreviations or those initializations into the emojis,
Speaker 1: and heck, the messaging system I use on Android will
Speaker 1: even suggest emoji for certain common words, such as displaying
Speaker 1: a little cartoon piece of cake if you write the
Speaker 1: word cake. This is cute if you're sending a message
Speaker 1: to somebody, like if I were texting my wife about
Speaker 1: cake and it showed a little picture of cake, I
Speaker 1: might want to use that, but it's really irritating if
Speaker 1: you're I don't know, trying to create a food diary
Speaker 1: entry into your fitness app. Cough cough. This happens to
Speaker 1: me a lot. Cough. So it turns out my Fitness
Speaker 1: Pal recognizes the word chicken, but it isn't so good
Speaker 1: at figuring out what a little cartoon chicken means. So
Speaker 1: I wish that this setting wouldn't automatically um pop up,
Speaker 1: because I have on occasion typed in emojis into my
Speaker 1: fitness tracker app and I've had to go back and
Speaker 1: edit it. First world problem, if ever there was one.
Speaker 1: Gosh darn it, this cartoon chicken is ruining my fitness
Speaker 1: application I have running on my smartphone. Now that I
Speaker 1: say it out loud, I'm actually ashamed that I even
Speaker 1: brought it up anyway. And Evans's research he found that
Speaker 1: of all smartphone owners in the United Kingdom had sent
Speaker 1: messages containing an emoji at some point or another, and
Speaker 1: fort of all smartphone owners had sent messages consisting of
Speaker 1: only emoji with no text accompanying it. So they were
Speaker 1: using emoji exclusively in some messages to communicate. Meaning that
Speaker 1: doesn't mean that they were only text in emoji, but
Speaker 1: that at some point or another they had only used
Speaker 1: an emoji to get an idea across and not used
Speaker 1: any text along with it. And there have been a
Speaker 1: lot of examples of various personalities and news outlets posting
Speaker 1: messages or headlines using only emoji. Now this is kind
Speaker 1: of interesting. There's a governing body that determines what is
Speaker 1: and isn't an official emoji. That body is a nonprofit
Speaker 1: organization called the Unicode Consortium, which sounds kind of ominous,
Speaker 1: so maybe we need some sort of shady emoji to
Speaker 1: put next to that name. But the purpose of the
Speaker 1: group is pretty straightforward. It's to create, maintain, and promote
Speaker 1: software internationalization standards so that we don't encounter issues when
Speaker 1: tech in One part of the world attempts to communicate
Speaker 1: with tech in another part of the world. It would
Speaker 1: be really frustrating if every time you try to send
Speaker 1: data to a device that was across the world, you
Speaker 1: ended up getting an error message because there was some
Speaker 1: sort of incompatibility with the way you were sending that message.
Speaker 1: So if you were just getting a message on your
Speaker 1: phone and all it was showing was blocks, just empty blocks,
Speaker 1: because the phone was unable to interpret what those emoji meant,
Speaker 1: then you're losing all meaning entirely. And of course, the
Speaker 1: purpose of emoji is to help get your meaning across
Speaker 1: to someone. So if there's no emoji there, if the
Speaker 1: way I'm receiving it is incompatible with the way you're
Speaker 1: sending it, I miss out on that intent. And it
Speaker 1: could be that I misinterpret your message or that I
Speaker 1: just don't standard at all, because if you're communicating primarily
Speaker 1: through emoji, all I'm getting our empty boxes. Well that's
Speaker 1: the purpose of this organization. It's not just for emoji.
Speaker 1: That's only one part of what they do. But emoji
Speaker 1: does have a standard, and by creating this international standard,
Speaker 1: they can ensure that various platforms are all able to
Speaker 1: interpret the same code so that they can display a
Speaker 1: relevant image so that when you receive it, you understand
Speaker 1: what's being sent. According to this consortium, emoji are pictographs
Speaker 1: a k a. Pictorial symbols that are typically presented in
Speaker 1: a colorful form and used inline in text. They represent
Speaker 1: things such as faces, whether vehicles and buildings, food and drink,
Speaker 1: animals and plants, or icons that represent emotions, feelings, or activities.
Speaker 1: The consortium determines the standards for how emoji should be designed.
Speaker 1: For example, each character should have an emoji variant, which
Speaker 1: can even include animation and a text presentation. Text presentation
Speaker 1: tends to be black and white or monochromatic. The standard
Speaker 1: goes on to say, a text presentation must be a
Speaker 1: simple foreground shape whose color is determined by other information
Speaker 1: and does not change. So if you were to have
Speaker 1: a text presentation of an emoji within other text, you
Speaker 1: could highlight all that text and change the font color,
Speaker 1: but the emoji itself should remain whatever the original color was.
Speaker 1: You cannot change it just by changing the color of
Speaker 1: the text. Its color is independently determined from the color
Speaker 1: of text itself. The standard ends up saying that, well,
Speaker 1: you need both of these things, and they both need
Speaker 1: to have the same core concept at play, but they
Speaker 1: can be very different designs. So, for example, an ice
Speaker 1: cream cone, the emoji version might be very colorful. It
Speaker 1: might be a little golden cone and then maybe a
Speaker 1: pink blob of ice cream, maybe even a little melting
Speaker 1: drop coming off of it, Whereas the text representation might
Speaker 1: be an icon that clearly has a cone and a
Speaker 1: little circle on top, and you would look at that
Speaker 1: and say, all right, well, that that's that's an ice
Speaker 1: cream cone. Because the cone tapers. I figured that's an
Speaker 1: ice cream cone. It's not a microphone, it's not something
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna mistake it for something else. And while
Speaker 1: the two instances look different from each other, they both
Speaker 1: link back to that same core concept. And that is
Speaker 1: absolutely critical with emoji. It has to link back to
Speaker 1: that core concept, or else it's not relevant. It's sending
Speaker 1: the wrong message. So you couldn't have an ice cream
Speaker 1: cone that could be mistaken for something else like a
Speaker 1: fire hydrant. That would end up causing massive community communication problems.
Speaker 1: I mean, if you send me a message says today
Speaker 1: is really hot, let's go out and buy a fire hydrant.
Speaker 1: I'd say that's no, I don't even know how you
Speaker 1: would do it, and then we'd have a breakdown in communication.
Speaker 1: So there are very specific rules that you have to
Speaker 1: follow in order to create these emoji, and I'll get
Speaker 1: into some more of those rules in just a minute.
Speaker 1: But before I get into that, let's take another quick
Speaker 1: break to thank our sponsor. The first country that ever
Speaker 1: created its own emojis for the purpose of national identity
Speaker 1: was Finland. Finland created Finnish emoji that you couldn't find
Speaker 1: anywhere else. Uh. For example, they had one of a
Speaker 1: person in a salma because it's Finland, the country where
Speaker 1: I'd quite want to be pony trekking or camping or
Speaker 1: just watching TV. If you get that reference that I
Speaker 1: just made, tell me, because I will be impressed and
Speaker 1: will bestow upon you my good wishes because I have
Speaker 1: nothing else to give away yet. These emojis, these Finish emojis,
Speaker 1: were not actually part of the Unicode standard, so they
Speaker 1: did not become universal because again those Unicode standards, that
Speaker 1: was an international standard. And while these emojis were popular
Speaker 1: in Finland, they didn't have a whole lot of application
Speaker 1: outside of that country. So they didn't become part of
Speaker 1: the general lexicon of emojis, so they are an emoji,
Speaker 1: but not an official emoji from the Unicode standpoint. Now,
Speaker 1: when an emoji does become standard, it can be included
Speaker 1: on digital keyboards across all platforms and devices. Otherwise you
Speaker 1: could be limited to a specific program to show particular
Speaker 1: types of emoji. There's an example I can give right
Speaker 1: away because I saw it earlier today on Twitch dot tv.
Speaker 1: One of the emojis you can post is a Bob
Speaker 1: Ross emoji. Bob Ross emojis are adorable, but they are
Speaker 1: also unique to Twitch. They're not going to be across
Speaker 1: all platforms. Now. One thing that has to be true
Speaker 1: no matter what platform it's on is that they should
Speaker 1: be identifiable to that core concept that was chosen in
Speaker 1: the first place. So if you send me that ice
Speaker 1: cream cone emoji, that's what I should see on my screen,
Speaker 1: regardless of the program. It might look like a different
Speaker 1: type of ice cream cone to me than it did
Speaker 1: to you, but it should be readily identifiable as an
Speaker 1: ice cream cone as opposed to some other object like
Speaker 1: a yo yo. There have been some interesting campaigns to
Speaker 1: get certain emoji adopted by the Unicode Consortium. For example,
Speaker 1: when it comes to food emoji, we have Taco Bell
Speaker 1: to thank for the taco emoji. That Taco Bell they
Speaker 1: organized a petition on change dot org, and it might
Speaker 1: be one of the few times I have ever heard
Speaker 1: of an online petition that actually created enough moment to
Speaker 1: get something done. And I might be a little snarky
Speaker 1: about that, but honestly, I think a lot of online
Speaker 1: petitions ultimately don't accomplish much. In this case, it accomplished something.
Speaker 1: I don't know that it was anything necessarily world changing,
Speaker 1: but it did get tacos added to official emojis. There
Speaker 1: was also a businesswoman named ye Ing Lu who was
Speaker 1: successful in petitioning the consortium into adopting a new food emoji,
Speaker 1: and that was the dumpling. This became known as the
Speaker 1: Dumpling Project. She argued that it should become an official
Speaker 1: emoji to join the other ones that were already represented. UH.
Speaker 1: A lot of the foods that were represented involved foods
Speaker 1: that were popular in Western cultures pizza, hamburgers, especially American culture.
Speaker 1: Not a big surprise seeing as how the web was
Speaker 1: so dominant and the United States was very dominant on
Speaker 1: the web. But people like yeing Lu wanted to have
Speaker 1: representation of other cultures, and so she argued that the
Speaker 1: dumplings should be adopted, and ultimately it was. And to
Speaker 1: be fair, dumplings can also appear in very different forms
Speaker 1: around the world, so it's not it's not something that
Speaker 1: is peculiar to Chinese culture. It is also in others
Speaker 1: as well, in different forms. There lots of different types
Speaker 1: of dumplings. There are certain rules that you have to
Speaker 1: follow if you want to submit an emoji. Now, first,
Speaker 1: there are certain subjects that are just against the rules,
Speaker 1: and this is where the bob Ross one would fall apart.
Speaker 1: You cannot create an emoji that represents any real person,
Speaker 1: alive or dead. So the bob Ross emoji would not
Speaker 1: pass muster for the Unicode emojis because it breaks that rule.
Speaker 1: That's off limits for Unicode adoption. Deities are also verboten.
Speaker 1: You cannot have a UH and an official emoji that
Speaker 1: represents a religious specific religious figure, so you won't find
Speaker 1: emojis representing Buddha or Jesus, for example, and you have
Speaker 1: to pass more subjective standards as well. For example, one
Speaker 1: of the requirements is that the emoji must have widespread appeal.
Speaker 1: In other words, this is what the Finnish ones would
Speaker 1: not have met. The person in as Sanna's probably not
Speaker 1: going to be as widespread as it would be in Scandinavia,
Speaker 1: so it doesn't really fit that criteria. However, this is subjective.
Speaker 1: How do you determine how popular something must be before
Speaker 1: you say it has widespread appeal? I don't know how
Speaker 1: they answer that question. It might be something that is
Speaker 1: a case by case basis. Some of them just end
Speaker 1: up being judgment calls, and sometimes it can take a
Speaker 1: while for the group to reach any sort of consensus
Speaker 1: on it. So it may be that something gets that
Speaker 1: gets dismissed early on is accepted later on because people
Speaker 1: have changed their perception and say, no, this has a
Speaker 1: wider ap you old than we first thought, and therefore
Speaker 1: it has merit. As an emoji and there are tons
Speaker 1: of stories of emoji being used in clever reporting or
Speaker 1: marketing or playful ways. But there are also a few
Speaker 1: stories that are a lot more serious, such as the
Speaker 1: case of Osiris Aristi. In the winter of Aristi posted
Speaker 1: some messages on Facebook. He had a publicly available Facebook profile,
Speaker 1: he did not have it, posting specifically to friends, and
Speaker 1: he was posting lots of angry messages, particularly about police,
Speaker 1: and one of those was a message made up of
Speaker 1: emoji that included a police officer emoji followed by three
Speaker 1: gun emojis that were pointed toward the police officer, and
Speaker 1: on January eight, police arrested Aristi, charging him with making
Speaker 1: a terrorist threat against police, among a few other charges.
Speaker 1: That terrorist charge would later be dropped, but it was
Speaker 1: a precedent showing that emoji do matter, that people can
Speaker 1: interpret that as actual serious language. Um made a lot
Speaker 1: of headlines at the time, and there were other charges
Speaker 1: that Aristi ended up getting called up on, but that
Speaker 1: particular terrorist charge did not hold up. It was it
Speaker 1: was dropped after about a month of the proceedings. Evans
Speaker 1: argues that emoji aren't a language in themselves, but rather
Speaker 1: are a code, which I agree with. I would also
Speaker 1: suggest that emoji could eventually become more than just a code,
Speaker 1: but that would require some other elements for emoji to
Speaker 1: actually qualify as a language. It could end up being
Speaker 1: something similar to what we see with sign language. And
Speaker 1: you've probably heard of sign language interpreters. You might even
Speaker 1: know sign language, but the reason we call them interpreters
Speaker 1: is they have to interpret the meaning people ache when
Speaker 1: they sign and then turn that into some other form
Speaker 1: of language like English, because sign language, uh isn't just
Speaker 1: a visual representation of language. In fact, that's not what
Speaker 1: it is at all. Sign language is not a visual
Speaker 1: version of English. American sign language is not just hand
Speaker 1: gestures that relate back to English words. Sign language is
Speaker 1: in itself its own language, with its own vocabulary, its
Speaker 1: own rules of grammar, sentence structure. All of the things
Speaker 1: you would find in any other language, they are present
Speaker 1: in sign language. So when people who learn sign language
Speaker 1: as an additional language learn it, they are frequently doing
Speaker 1: a more direct interpretation of English and then translating that
Speaker 1: into signs. People who are using sign language natively are
Speaker 1: communicating ideas through sign language. It's not filtering into English
Speaker 1: and then in a sign language, it is straight into
Speaker 1: sign language. It is a language like any other. Emoji
Speaker 1: don't qualify as that. Emoji do not have a codified
Speaker 1: set of rules and grammar that they can follow where
Speaker 1: you can expect to get your meaning across. Emoji depend
Speaker 1: heavily upon pre existing languages, and that also means that
Speaker 1: they tend to follow the logical course that our languages
Speaker 1: follow for all of our respective cultures. What I mean
Speaker 1: by that is English has a very specific grammatical structure.
Speaker 1: We have a particular word order we associate with intent
Speaker 1: and meaning. So if I were to try and spell
Speaker 1: out a message in emoji, it would likely follow a
Speaker 1: pattern that would be similar to what I would say
Speaker 1: if I were speaking those words out or typing those
Speaker 1: words out. But if you came from a different culture
Speaker 1: that had different grammar, different word order and sentence structure,
Speaker 1: you might try and express the exact same concept I'm
Speaker 1: talking about with a completely different order of emoji, because
Speaker 1: you would be following the logic dictated by your own
Speaker 1: language rather than by English. And because of this, emoji
Speaker 1: don't have a universal set of rules to follow. They
Speaker 1: cannot really be a language. It is more of a code.
Speaker 1: It's a codified version of an pre existing language that
Speaker 1: tries to get those concepts across through pictures rather than
Speaker 1: through words, but they're still following the grammatical rules in
Speaker 1: general that words follow. To wrap this up, I thought
Speaker 1: it'd be fun to talk about some of the most
Speaker 1: popular emoji, which is turns out a very difficult thing
Speaker 1: to determine. I actually used a tool called emoji tracker
Speaker 1: dot com to look at real time feedback on which
Speaker 1: emoji we're getting the most frequent use on Twitter. I
Speaker 1: do not recommend looking at it if you suffer from
Speaker 1: UH seizures like if if visual cues can trigger a seizure,
Speaker 1: don't look at emoji emoji tracker dot com because there's
Speaker 1: lots of stuff changing rapidly as you look at it
Speaker 1: in real time. But first place easily goes to what
Speaker 1: is often referred to as face with joy. It's also
Speaker 1: the the laughing so hard tears are coming out emoji,
Speaker 1: so it represents that you're so overcome with joy that
Speaker 1: you're crying tears as a result. Second place would go
Speaker 1: to just a simple heart emoji. Uh, that's adorable. Third
Speaker 1: place would go to the smiley face that has hearts
Speaker 1: for eyes. So you see that the first few all
Speaker 1: have to do with joy and love, which is nice. Uh.
Speaker 1: It's only when you get to fifth place on emoji
Speaker 1: tracker dot com that I saw the first sad emoji,
Speaker 1: where it was a sad crying face, and seventh when
Speaker 1: you get your first true displeasure emoji. Not just sad,
Speaker 1: but I do not approve of this kind of face. Now,
Speaker 1: Twitter is just one source. The University of Michigan actually
Speaker 1: conducted a study back in to look at the most
Speaker 1: popular emoji. They found similar results across the board. The
Speaker 1: face with joy emoji was still number one in their
Speaker 1: In their search, it appeared more than twice as often
Speaker 1: as the second most popular emoji, which again was the heart. Uh.
Speaker 1: The okay symbol as in the circle made with the
Speaker 1: forefinger and thumb that was in the top ten. Uh.
Speaker 1: Ninth place went to the first sad crying emoji, so
Speaker 1: sadness did not get in the top five, but it
Speaker 1: was number nine. The see no Evil monkey was number thirteen,
Speaker 1: and number twenty was clapping hands. I was amazed that
Speaker 1: Pooh didn't make the top twenty. Twitter issued a report
Speaker 1: in twenty sixteen that gave indications the most popular emoji
Speaker 1: include eating a breakdown by country, which I found absolutely fascinating.
Speaker 1: In the United States and in Canada and the United Kingdom,
Speaker 1: it was an expression of dismay. It was an open mouthed,
Speaker 1: sad eyes expression. It looked like someone wailing and let's
Speaker 1: be fair. Two thousand sixteen was a pretty freaking rough
Speaker 1: year for a lot of places, so you can imagine
Speaker 1: why the UK and North and North America had this
Speaker 1: sort of despair face going South America was all about
Speaker 1: music in ten they were all using musical note emoji,
Speaker 1: holding the number one spot in various countries in South America.
Speaker 1: Mexico was the high five emoji, and uh you had.
Speaker 1: Spain's emoji was the arm making a bicep muscle pose,
Speaker 1: so you know, showing them the guns. So there was
Speaker 1: just one guns, the right arm. So Spain apparently was
Speaker 1: very um muscular. Remind been some machiesmo in there, I
Speaker 1: don't know. Germany was given everybody the old thumbs up.
Speaker 1: In Italy, France and Japan all had different variations of hearts,
Speaker 1: like one had like a heart with a little arrow
Speaker 1: through it. One of them had a heart with little
Speaker 1: wings attached. But yeah, they all they all were very sweet,
Speaker 1: whereas South Korea was getting super romantic with a lips emoji,
Speaker 1: you know, like a lipstick mark. Smoochy smoochy. Hey, South Korea,
Speaker 1: call me, I hope you're not upset about those Samsung
Speaker 1: episodes I did where I talked about your government in
Speaker 1: the end. Emoji and emoticons can help us get those
Speaker 1: messages across with less of a chance for a misinterpretation
Speaker 1: of our intent, or they can be used to completely
Speaker 1: baffle our audience or present a challenge. What the heck
Speaker 1: does it mean if I post an airplane, cake monkey
Speaker 1: and Irish flag in sequence? I'll never tell, but I
Speaker 1: do hope you enjoyed listening to this episode. If you
Speaker 1: have suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, you can
Speaker 1: send those to me. You can send them via email
Speaker 1: the shows addresses text Stuff at how stuff works dot com,
Speaker 1: or you can always drop me a line on Facebook
Speaker 1: or Twitter. The handle for both of those would be
Speaker 1: text Stuff h s W. Remember I live stream my
Speaker 1: podcasts on Wednesdays and Fridays over at twitch dot tv
Speaker 1: slash tech Stuff, so feel free to jump over there
Speaker 1: check out the schedule see if you can join us
Speaker 1: for a live show. The chat room is a lot
Speaker 1: of fun, and I tend to spend a lot of
Speaker 1: time chatting with you guys in between segments, so I
Speaker 1: look forward to seeing you there in the near future,
Speaker 1: and I'll talk to you again really soon. Winky face
Speaker 1: for more on this and thousands of other topics because
Speaker 1: it has to works. Dot com eight