Yesterday my friend Rich mentioned that there's some kind of organization that determines world wide standards for what I would have called emoticons - those smiley and frowny faces, those little thumbs up and thumbs down images that you put onto texts, unless you have educated, hip, intolerant friends. Well, I do, but I use those little guys all the time. Probably makes my friends a little sick to their stomachs.
Anyway, the idea that there are groups of serious people whose whole jobs probably consist of making stern rulings on which new emojis and which changes to existing ones would be "allowed", whatever that meant, kind of floored me, and struck me as very funny. I was so taken with the thought that I did something this blog is dead set against - I looked into it, even just a little.
The first thing I learned, or almost learned I think, was that emoticons are the clever little micro pictures people type using keyboards and typing parentheses, colons, semi-colons, brackets, letters...Emojis are the ones that are all there for you and you just select them, like little mini cartoons, coloured, expressive, often corny as anything. They're the ones people really use a lot on portable devices, primarily cell phones.
The second thing kind of blurs together with a lot of other things. There are something like 750 emojis defined and approved by this group. All cell phones use something called Unicode as their underlying programming language. The emojis available to you in your cell phone are selected by your phone's manufacturer from that big set of 750. They periodically need to be updated. There's a lengthy process for getting new ones and changes approved, potentially involving meeting with the council to talk about the emoji you've presented for approval, and presenting your case complete with research showing that the emoticon version of it is already in somewhat widespread use, or that cell phone manufacturers are clamouring for it. It goes on and on. These frivolous little smiley faces, with silly names and attributes, are clearly serious business, and not only that, they probably need to be, given their popularity and the fact that their presence on your phone probably plays a part in its longevity, given that they're code and that they need to be updated occasionally.
(I'm still not sure why cell phones magically become nearly useless right around the same time as my contract with the carrier is coming to an end, but my current theory is that it has to do with not being able to keep the phone's software up to date, the same way desktop machines eventually have to be replaced because nothing will run on them anymore...but I'm not sure. For all I know it could just be that Those Guys, Down in Marketing (Chem Trails reference) have convinced me I just need a new one, against my weak, helpless will. I tend to think my first theory is generally right, which then gives rise to awestruck speculation about how manufacturers estimate the length of time it will be before their customers load up their cells with so much junk that they can longer run well, how they build the cell so that its capacities will be exceeded by the average user in just about the same length of time as the average cell carrier contract lasts.)
The website for the council seems to have been written by Mr. Spock's science teacher, and is highly technical and well thought out and pretty convincing - I didn't find myself laughing at it at all, which was surprising and yet strangely not disappointing.
There are whole groups of people actively engaged in reviewing and commenting on the changes and additions that do get approved and rejected - witness, as a recent example, the controversy over the announcement of the new coloured hand emoji. I tend to think of those of us who actually use emojis without blushing as the peasants outside the cloistered halls of the Unicode Academy, or whatever it's called. Outside in the street, there's a raucous and occasionally violent debate about whether a poop emoji means the end of the moral structure keeping the world in orbit, and what Oprah had to say about it. Inside, someone in either a business suit or a lab coat is being asked to explain how much code it will take to make the poop image steam versus remaining a static image, and whether they have data on the relative demand for the steaming and non-steaming versions, and what the market share of the new Hilarious Lucky Phone Company in mainland China is expected to be over the next two years.
I find myself wondering whether there are whole groups of developers who specialize in emoji coding, and what their business cards say, and whether there's hot competition to hire them among phone manufacturers, specialized courses, and so on. ("Hey, you see that guy over there eating ramen and reading that comic book? You know who that is? That's Phil Chang, the guy who made the poop steam with less than 20 lines of code! Yeah, that's him, THE Phil Chang...").
Before I give you the link to the Unicode website so you can find out the extent to which I have distorted and misunderstood this whole topic, I'll just add that I have a nephew who almost certainly knows alllll about this stuff. Nathan, if you're reading this, remember that I'm fundamentally a decent person in spite of my towering ignorance and glib talk.
Okay, go nuts: http://www.unicode.org
For even more fun, check this out: it's a site that provides weekly popularity rankings for emojis, along with speculation and insight about why this one or that one is being used more or less than last week (as an aside, when I look at this site it seems clear that there's no debate at all about the poop emoji - it's a huge success):
http://ca.complex.com/pop-culture/2013/11/emoji-power-rankings/crystal-ball
Even the August New York Times is interested:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/08/opinion/sunday/turn-emojis-red-white-and-blue.html?_r=0
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