 Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the fourth program behind the designs. We're excited to have you all here. This lunchtime discussion is an opportunity for our curators, conservators, and educators, and other specialists to come together for conversations around our collection and exhibitions. And it's also an opportunity for you, the audience, to ask questions. So please put all of your questions in the Q&A part of Zoom. So not the chat, but the Q&A part of Zoom. And just a little advanced warning that our next program will take place on September 14th. And we'll focus on textiles in our collection by the mid-century designer, Dorothy Libas, who's also the subject of a 2022 exhibition. So we get a little sneak peek. A big thank you, as always, to Phoebe Moore and to Emily Brillion, who are helping with today's program. I will be moderating the discussion or the Q&A at the end. So please, again, put your questions in the chat. So I'm going to turn it over in a second to Andrea Lips, who's Associate Curator of Contemporary Design at Cooper Hewitt and Jennifer Lee, our guest, who's an emoji activist, a documentary producer, and CEO of Plimpton, a literary studio that works on innovative publishing projects. And they are going to be delving into emojis. And as a bonus for everyone joining us today, you should have received a link to the documentary Emoji Nation, which is making the Film Festival Circuit that was produced by Jennifer. And the link you'll receive is Good Through World Emoji Day, which is on July 17. So over to you, Andrea and Jennifer. Yay. Hi. Good afternoon. Thank you, Matilda, for the introduction. And thanks to Jenny for joining me today as we unpack some stories behind Emoji. Thanks to all of you for joining us here in virtual space. So I think the thing which is so interesting about Emoji is that they really don't need much explanation or introduction. I mean, even if you don't have a mobile device or use a platform that includes the Emoji keyboard, you likely have come across Emoji. I mean, the movie Emoji Stories, which Jenny and Adobe generously made available to each attendee here. And if you have not yet watched it, I hope that you will. I mean, even that movie opens by showing us how Emoji have moved out of virtual space and into the real world. I mean, they are Emoji are made into pillows and toys. They adorn hats and shirts and socks and coffee mugs. I mean, my five-year-old knows about Emoji as does my 76-year-old father. So they are ubiquitous and a part of our everyday lives. And at the very least, we know about them if we don't already just use them regularly. So our talk today is foregrounded by the fact that Cooper Hewitt has acquired the person with headscarf Emoji and the inner skin tone couple Emoji into our collection. We began that work in 2019. We accession them in very early 2020, pre-pandemic. And all of that brings us to Jenny and me here today talking about one of our favorite things to talk about together, which is Emoji. So first of all, Jenny, you are a co-founder of Emoji Nation. So what is this about? What is Emoji Nation? So I'm a co-founder with Ying Liu who is a great designer and actually famous for designing the Twitter fail well. We were shocked that there was no dumpling Emoji as Chinese American women who, you know, texts a lot about food. And so in our indignation, we founded an organization called Emoji Nation which advocates for more inclusive and representative Emoji. And so, you know, what the organization does and I'll get into more detail is it's sort of the interface between humans who want Emoji and the bureaucracy that creates them and gets them onto your phone. You know, and it's interesting because I think that idea of inclusion and representation shouldn't be such a novel idea. But, you know, I mean, really when Emoji did first hit our keyboards, you know, they were lacking in much diversity. So I would love for you to get us started, Jenny. Just tell us a little bit about the history of Emoji. How do these pictograms hit our devices? Let us start. Let's see. Boom, all right. So it's about Emoji Nation and our movie which you guys can get a link to, you know, thanks to the sponsorship of Adobe who very generously both helped us allow us on the premise to help shoot the documentary and then also, you know, sponsored educational museums and screenings. So, so one's a question. One of the questions is where do Emoji come from? And that I actually did not know any of this in 2015. When I first started, I had no idea. I barely used Emoji, but I fell down this big rabbit hole. After discovering there was no dumpling Emoji and like decided there was something wrong with the world and I would fix it, that, you know, dumplings were universal in all forms, you know, pierogi, empanadas, yosa, momos. Emoji were universal. And the fact that those did not intersect meant the world was broken. So I Googled and I found that actually that Emoji are actually regulated by this thing called the Unicode Consortium, which is dominated by large US multinational companies. These include Netflix and IBM, Microsoft, Adobe, Google, Apple, Facebook, Salesforce. These are the main, main full voting members of Unicode of the ones that are not US multinational companies. The two dominant ones are SAP, which is a German software company and then the government of Oman. So these are the entities that kind of have voting power over your Emoji. So they pay actually now at this point it's $21,000 a year to have membership. And I was very kind of bothered by that when I first discovered it, but then found this little loophole, which is up for $75. You can join Unicode as an individual person on your credit card. It does not give you any voting rights, but it allows you to be on the mailing list and it allows you to sort of attend meetings. And so that's what I did when they had a call for like, you know, come to our quarterly meeting. And so I just took a bus or no, I took the caltering basically to Apple offices. And what I found was this is a room where it happens. These are the people who at that point, this is 2015, decide what emoji become what emoji. These were your emoji decision makers. And I just felt like they weren't the most representative groups for demographics. Like they skewed older, they skewed engineering, they skewed male, they skewed white-ish. What's that with a lot of other immigrant engineers kind of in the pool? So in terms of curating a global visual language, I was like, oh, I don't think this is the right process. So we start, that's one of the reasons we started Emoji Nation in part because I heard their debates, you know, in terms of like, should there be an emoji? Well, what kind of being red being, black being, you know, different cultures of different beings. And so in 2014, 15, we just like, they decide not to have a bean emoji. So as part of that, you know, you learn how to, how emoji become emoji. So literally, it's a process where anyone can submit, like literally anyone, as long as you kind of do the homework, it has a sort of the vibe of doing a very detailed high school lab report. So let's say you come up with an idea, then you basically write a proposal. The proposal gets submitted to the emoji subcommittee and they sometimes have feedback. And if they have feedback, it goes back to you and you have to adjust it. And then it kind of goes around and around and around until it feels like it wants to kick it up to the full committee, which is a Unicode technical committee. So what are the factors for inclusion? Some of them include, you know, is there popular demand? Is the terms frequently used? So for like animals, you can often show that there's a man for like a flamingo or that, you know, peacocks have our national bird for many countries. You know, there's sort of a plus if there's multiple usages and meanings in terms of an image. So for example, like an owl is not only a bird, but it can mean wise or a fox is not only fox, but it can often mean like crafty. A key thing is can you recognize it at emoji sizes? The thing is when you squeeze it down to such a small image, there are many things that actually can't be expressed, both because the image is small or the concept is just too abstract, right? So like, you know, ambition would be sort of like an important kind of concept, but very hard to distinguish or like represent visually. And then they, for a while there, they really, you know, privileged things that filled gaps. So there was at one point a red, yellow, green, blue, purple, heart, but no orange. So orange obviously kind of got elevated to make a complete rainbow set. So things that kind of strike against emoji inclusion, one is it's too specific, too narrow, like it's a very specific kind of dog or very specific, you know, kind of bird. If it's redundant, so an example is we once had a turkey, we have like a live turkey emoji and someone wanted to cook turkey emoji and we're like, hmm, that's actually fine. Like you can, you just need one turkey emoji. Again, this idea of being visually discernible, one thing we've been trying to get is kimchi kind of past, but it's just hard. Like kimchi, little red cabbage is really hard at emoji sizes. And then something that's actually really key is there are no logos, brands, deities or celebrities. So you can't get a Donald Trump emoji. Like you can't get like, you know, a Coca-Cola emoji. You can't get a Muhammad emoji for many reasons. So once it gets picked up to the full technical committee, it votes, you know, basically once a year to approve a set of emoji that will be released, you know, the next of basically the following year and then once it gets approved, it gets passed to the tech companies who then put it on the whole, you know, all the devices. And that entire process takes out 18 to 24 months, which is very long, very long. You have to have a lot of kind of persistence to get it through. And so one of the questions is like, why, why does the Unicode consortium control emoji? And that's actually kind of very counterintuitive. So originally emoji started on Japanese carriers, one of the big, you know, first sets was a $9.99 from DoCoMo. These are the ones that were actually collected in the Museum of Modern Art back in 2016, I think. So, you know, they, all the different carriers basically had their emoji. And so that means that you could basically only message with the same carrier. So basically if you were at the equivalent of like, if you were AT&T, you could only share emoji among AT&T people, Verizon equivalent, you know, had their emoji. So what happened was when the US tech companies like Apple and Google started selling phones, Japanese folks really wanted emoji. And so they realized that they had to unify their sets across all the different platforms. So they went to Unicode for help. And part of that is because Unicode's mission is to enable everyone speaking every language on earth to be able to use their language on the computer and smartphone. And they really do think of this as a human's right rights issue, because that's from point of your language is not preserved or it can't be transmitted digitally. It will get lost, you know, in either because you can't type, you can't send email, you know, you can't send texts or you can't save and make digital files. And so it kind of did a big sweep where it just unifies, you know, like Chinese, Japanese, Korean characters and, you know, Cyrillic and Arabic and English. And even sort of at this point, you know, they had hieroglyphics kind of wrapped in. So Unicode basically look at emoji and you're like, oh, we know how to like digitize things and standardize things. So let's do it. So one of the, you know, just to give you some broader overview of Unicode, they are known for emoji, but in fact, they do lots of different things, including making everything on your, internationalizing your computer, right? Like helping to know, like if you're in France, you should be using euros and the date format should look like this or the, you know, time format should look like this. And so these are the kinds of things they create a lot of libraries and sort of resources to make things very specific. So it took three years, 2010, they came out with, this is the original set from Apple. It took a long time for them to unify and make the set. So they were kind of hanging out on like in the back of the keyboard. I mean, they were in Unicode, but it doesn't mean that people were using them until Apple and iOS basically added emoji to the iPhone. And then you can kind of just kind of see this explosion is turning 2011. So that is how we ended up where we are today, which is that I really felt like it hit a nerve that in some ways emoji were discovered rather than invented to see that kind of like visceral, like straight line growth means that you really tapped into a human need. Yeah, totally. And it's interesting because your role on the emoji sum committee is the reason that you and I met because I had been eyeing emoji that were part of earlier emoji version releases. And I was seeking to connect with folks who could help me do that. And along the way, you and I got introduced, we started a conversation and I think that quite immediately I knew that I wanted to try to acquire the hijab emoji and the inner skin tone couple emoji, that emoji nation had been instrumental in shepherding. And so among the emoji that you had told me about, I mean, those just had such resonant stories. So from your telling, how did the hijab emoji proposal come into your orbit? Yeah, so I had actually been thinking for a long time that we need a hijab emoji, but whereas I had a lot of moral authority in getting the dumpling emoji through along with, take out box and fortune cookies and chopsticks because I had a lot of background in Asian food, I did not have any moral authority to be the one to offer the hijab emoji. So I had actually been like kind of like asking around, like asking friends of friends, like, do you know anyone who would want to work on a hijab emoji? And, you know, people are like kind of interested, but to go through this kind of bureaucratic process takes a lot of endurance. And so you can only kind of like rally people in a volunteer capacity so much. And then in August of 2015, no, 2016, in August 2016, this proposal, the one I'm showing there, just sort of arrives, oh, was it August? It's, I guess it's no, no, oh, I guess we redid it, so to update it, but kind of in that time, like fall of 2016, we saw this emoji proposal come through and it was from a 15-year-old Saudi Arabian girl who really wanted a hijab emoji to represent herself. And it was actually like a pretty solid proposal. I mean, when, actually when she first sent it, there was no age, so I didn't know if this was like, it was a grandma or was it a professor or who it was. And so I emailed back to ask her how old, or I think I was probably more tasteful as like, can you tell me about yourself? You know, are you a designer, are you in school? And she said she was a 15-year-old high school student. I was like, yes, this is amazing. So her name is Ray Roof Alhumadi and we worked with her to sort of shape the proposal. You know, first we had some designers on our team that helped kind of like, we worked through all these different versions of like, what should a hijab emoji be like? Like, should it really be a hijab emoji? Should it be called headscarf? It's because there was this push for gender parity. Should we have both a woman in a headscarf and a man in a headscarf? So, you know, do we want to encode a human with the sort of hijab or do we just only want to do the hijab by itself? You know, like there are a lot of hats. So we went through lots of different iterations. This is the version that we kind of covered all our bases. And ultimately the ones that I ended up on your phone kind of look like this. And there was kind of a lot of debate about what color you want the hijab to be. And you can see the different vendors went with different colors. Apple went with purple. Oops, okay, that's the first one. And then the inner skin tone couple. Yeah, so one of the most, I think one of the hardest technical proposals that like we at Emoji Nation kind of worked through was doing inner skin tone. So for a long time, okay, so for the first time there was like only yellow skin tone, right? Which was supposed to be just like generic human. And in part that's because Emoji came from Japan which people were kind of like basically the same color ish, right? And you can see the Japanese view of the world in a couple of ways, right? So you have like just generic man, boy, girl, mother or girl, woman, old person. They were just all yellow. And then to differentiate race and ethnicity, you had an Indian guy who is expressed by a turban, a Chinese guy who's sort of expressed by the little skull cap. And then like a Westerner which is just expresses blonde. Like so there was just like a blonde emoji. And the way that we do it now or many places do it now, they do it like with a ponytail like someone who's a little bit younger. So that was a worldview. You were like generic human, you were Chinese, you were Indian or you were blonde. And in that as Emoji kind of explored the world many people felt very dissatisfied with the yellow emoji skin colors because while it was technically not supposed to be any color and therefore all colors in reality because of our associations with the Simpsons and just like yellowness, like it really kind of felt default white. And so there was a entrepreneur mother from Houston in Katrina Parrot who wanted skin tone emoji because her daughter just came home one day and said, it'd be really great to get skin tone or emoji that looked like me. And her mom, Katrina was like, that's great honey, what are emoji? But she, so she started from ground zero not knowing what emoji were but then like also found like Unicode and like wrote a very sophisticated proposal that is how we got skin tone. So there are five skin tones, you know, it's basically one Fitzpatrick, one and two, three, four, five, six. This is based on a dermatological system. So for a long time they, so what they did was they just basically just slapped like skin coloring on an emoji, which is weird in certain ways because it was almost like a color fill. So I have many black friends that complained to me that like even the palms of the black hands are the same brown compared to like the rest of hand where that's like actually not the case and feet are also the issue. So it's really just like a color fill not necessarily representative like what these body parts look like in real life. So for a long time we only could add skin tones to one human or one hand. So anything that had more than one human. So that's wrestling, that's the two ladies in the dancing, you know, the dancing bunnies, that's like the handshake. Because you can only add one color, the platforms decided not to make any of those have skin tones because it would kind of imply you could only, it was like a segregated world that you could only like wrestle with people who were the same color with you. You could only shake hands with people who were the same color with you. You know, you can only dance with people who were the same color with as you. So this is a problem for all kinds of reasons and we basically felt like the couple emoji was very important in sort of expressing reality in the diversity of couples and love. And so Tinder randomly, because I had a friend whose company was bought by Tinder and then he introduced me to some marketing person and that marketing person had this idea with their kind of comms team to support. They were interested in just like getting Tinder involved around emoji and we were brainstorming and they felt very strongly about inter skin tone or interracial couples because there has been quite a lot of academic work that shows that when online dating in all its various forms arrives in a community, the interracial marriage and dating rates go up. And so they felt like it was a social cause that was both professionally meaningful to them as an organization and also just like socially meaningful. So we helped design these proposals which are actually really complex because before you could just do long press and you had one, you just got all the colors pop up and now you're choosing two colors. And so we as part of our proposal like gave like a whole bunch of options. Like, how do you do it? Maybe you long press and you choose one going up, up and down and one going sideways or all the different ways. And she convinced the platforms that this was something feasible, right? Cause sometimes they'll be like, oh, that's too hard to implement but to their credit, Apple, Google and all the other platforms got behind this concept. And now we have interracial or inter-technically inter-stand-home couples and one of the writers who worked on it, a woman named Melissa Thermador who's from New York originally black American now lives in England with her husband who's from India felt a cry when she first saw the emoji that could represent her husband and her because she felt seen. And it's kind of really powerful to know that something you've worked on has caused people to cry, has moved people to that point. Yeah. And that's what's so interesting about emoji is I think sometimes people tend to write them off. They seem so informal, just a part of our everyday digital conversations and whatnot. But I mean, it really is codifying representation which is incredibly powerful. And for us at the museum, what was so interesting is we really felt that these two examples, the hijab emoji, the interskintone couple emoji told different but very resonant stories that press into their acquisition. And so what was interesting though, and you and I kind of worked through this a little bit was thinking about how to acquire emoji. And so we decided to acquire the guidance images which were, for instance, those first three for the hijab emoji, the initial designs of those emoji that will eventually hit our keyboard. So we acquired those. We went beyond that. We did a lot of designer interviews. We interviewed you, of course, Jenny. We interviewed Rayouf. We interviewed Afi, who is the designer behind these. We acquired the PDF proposals. We have screen recordings and screenshots taken from varying devices and platforms showing the emoji and you. So, but what's interesting also is this idea that I imagine the emoji subcommittee at Unicode Consortium. I mean, they have to be very selective about what they put on the keyboard because ultimately there isn't just endless space for everything under the sun. I mean, the museum also has to be selective, of course, about what digital history we acquire and preserve since our resources also are ultimately limited in all of this. So, I think what's really interesting though is how with your participation now on the emoji subcommittee and your work with Emoji Nation and really just raising awareness around this process itself, bringing people in and producing the emoji story, which is such a fun movie. I mean, we really are seeing emoji grow in inclusion of cultures and identities and such that are on the emoji keyboard. I mean, I think it's pretty apparent but I mean, for you, for instance, why was it so important for emoji to represent us? Yeah, so it has one of the things that you see on the emoji subcommittee as the proposals come in is, remember I mentioned, you really need a driving passion to get an emoji through. And I remember one time someone complained on Twitter when they saw the hijab emoji, you know, like, I mean, most of the world was like super pro hijab emoji but you got your trolls and one person was like, well, what about a baseball cap emoji? This is on Twitter, right? And I was like, well, you wanna work on a baseball cap emoji, like we can help you. And then I think they were just like, yeah, you know, like can't be bothered, right? And so you see the sort of interesting thing where like some things could be an emoji and we actually did eventually do the baseball cap emoji for an interesting reason because we wanted multiple headwear to move through the emoji process with the hijab. So it wasn't just a hijab, it was like, oh, it's a hijab. And then the baseball cap. So the ones that are most ferment often have to do with issues of identity. So you have like redheads really wanted redheads, you know, people who are bald wanted to, you know, bald, white haired people or white and gray haired people. You had skin tones, you had, obviously you have the hijab emoji. One of the more interesting ones are also non-gender binary people. One of the interesting things when we started sort of adding like genders to a lot of things was that in order to differentiate, the female forms got more feminine looking and the male emoji got more masculine looking. And specifically within Apple, the way they do that is sort of indicated with a mustache. So then there were people who didn't, who felt like not included in that like dichotomy. And so Paul Hunt from Adobe actually helped push the first like non-gender binary emoji, which, you know, is really important in many ways because in our language, we often use gender neutral forms like doctor or teacher or professor or pilot, for example. They're at least in English, there's no gender associated, but when you wanted to represent an emoji, suddenly you were forced to kind of to choose what do I want to do a female pilot or a male pilot or a female professor or a male professor. So you were kind of kind of forcing the visual silos for many terms that were gender neutral, like adult. Adult is not actually necessarily male or female. So what I realized kind of over time is that these people wanted to represent themselves in part because, and it's my hypothesis, emoji are very good in terms of like representing emotions, you have all the little smiling faces, representing like kind of like verbs, which are like actions, so swimming and biking, running, even like snowboarding, fencing. It's pretty good on certain kinds of adjectives and, you know, on objects that are nouns. So like, you know, boat, clock, gun, those kinds of things. But as a language, one of the things that it really lacks, and it's kind of very fundamental, it can't say the word I very well and it can't say the word you, yeah, very well. I think we've kind of adapted to that idea. I think we fixed the ability to say you soon, but I is the most fundamental kind of word and concept for many, in many languages in a spoken form, right? Like, you know, in Chinese it's wall, you know, and in Spanish it's yo and then in French it's, you know. And so when you are forced into a pictorial representation of a quote, language, you suddenly need something that looks like you. And I think what everyone was trying to do is trying to get their representation to of themselves in the digital world that, and just because of the way that emoji have evolved, those are emoji that have like certain kinds of hair colors or certain kinds of skin color or certain kinds of like, you know, kind of gender kind of features. And I like to say, you know, there's so much attention and obsession in a very good way about what happens on the big screen. Like you have Oscars so white, you know, you have, you know, this big push to diversify like the movies that are made in the first place and much less, you know, up for awards. But so you obsess about the big screen, but in many ways what happens on the small screen in terms of representation is just as important if not more important, because it's so intimate in terms of day to day communication and how do you represent your emotions and your state of being and, you know, where you come from. Yeah, absolutely fantastic. So listen, we are moving into our Q and A session. And one of the things I wanna do is invite all of our attendees, if you have a question about an emoji, like you just, you don't know what the heck this thing is, post that emoji into the chat or potentially even into the Q and A, but the chat would be better so we all can see it. And Jenny, who is our resident emoji expert can tell us a little bit more about that emoji and perhaps what it means. I do have to say Jenny, I actually got a text in the midst of a meeting from a colleague. Like maybe last month I think it was when the new emoji version had come out and the way that it appeared on my screen was like a little smiley face with clouds. Yes, yes, yes. That's sad. It's you, that was part of her. And it's a, so one thing actually that's very interesting from an emoji perspective is you can get into this, but technically many emoji are actually not singleton characters. They're sort of secretly like concatenated in the background. So a good example for that is rainbow flag, which is actually, there's no single character rainbow flag. It is actually a rainbow glued together using like a ligature with a white flag. So if you squish those together, the operating system is like, oh, I'm gonna render that as a rainbow flag. And you see this actually with a lot of the occupations as well. So like chef, there's no singleton chef character. It's sort of a woman emoji or a male man emoji. I think it's with the frying pan and you squish those together and you get a chef. And like astronaut is like, you know, an adult kind of squish together with the rocket and that's how you get astronaut. So I like to say they're almost like compound words, but in the form of a motif. And the thing about the clouds, so 2021, so the ones in 2020 that have kind of arrived in your phones in 2021, I think it's 2021. So essentially we lost half a year on emoji regulation in part because of COVID, like much of the world kind of lost a lot of time. And as a result, the only ones that we could introduce this last round that just came through were also concatenations. So the cloud one is a smiley face and flattening it with clouds. That makes sense. Like we couldn't introduce like new inventive characters because that gets much more deeper into like the infrastructure of operating systems, but sort of like just taking two characters when they're like glued together and just rendering in a certain way is a much lighter lift from a operating system standpoint. That was so interesting. So I have to tell you Hilda Jarrah actually posted an emoji into the Q&A, Jenny. So if you want to take a look there, what is that? I honestly, I don't even remember ever. Oh, in the Q&A. Oh, whoa, so many. Oh, there we go. Sorry, I was like scrolling. Yes, okay, Hilda, this is one. Okay, so Hilda, can other people see it or only me? No, only we can see it. So Hilda, if it's possible to post that into the chat to all panelists and attendees, then everyone can see this. So this is a very, it looks like a very jagged and sharp McDonald's M that's like walking. So it's basically just something like this, but it is yellow. That also perplexed me to the point that I spent some time Googling it. It's a very strange symbol. It's basically a musical symbol used in Japanese music. So not in sort of like our Western style with the sharps and the dots and whatever, but it's used in Japanese music. And as a result, since emoji were originally Japanese and the first set was sort of unifying three sets of different Japanese carriers into basic, I think that set of like 600 and 700 original kind of Unicode emoji. Many of those have a lot of Japanese cultural references that may not make sense to a Western audience. So like there's one that we call like tofu on fire, which is basically red tulip with a little white box in it. And that's sort of a name tag for school. There's also like a green shaped emoji that means new driver in Japan, but obviously doesn't mean very much here. And there's a bunch of like Japanese holidays that are referenced. So that is one of the kind of interesting legacies of a global language that came originally from one culture. And because we have this world that wants an emoji, always an emoji, like you can't like remove the underlying code for an emoji in Unicode because it's like getting rid of the letter B, for example. Things will always kind of persist on the keyboard. They just, we just get more and more of them. There is a little bit of a subtlety in that you can change the image associated with an emoji concept. And you saw this a couple of years ago when there was a gun emoji that looked like a gun after a couple of law cases where the emoji was used in situations that essentially escalate into homicide. So you had a bunch of cases like that. So some question of whether or not like emoji were used as a threat. And maybe would these people still be alive they hadn't texted using like the gun emoji? Apple was the first platform to move and change like the gray gun emoji into basically a water pistol. I mean, he just like unilaterally did that by himself into this little gray pistol, sorry into this little green like water pistol. And that was actually really confusing for a while because Apple had done this, but like if you were on Android or Microsoft, you did not have that. So you could be like jokingly like let's go, let's get it apart for a water fight, like a water drop and then the green water pistol. And on the other side, if you got it on an Android device, it would be like water and then like a gun. I mean, it would be a very weird kind of not cross compatible messaging etiquette. So all the other platforms also moved basically to a water gun representation. That makes sense. So that yellow weird thing is largely a function of just like because emoji were originally Japanese. Oh, we have so many emoji. Okay. I want to get to some of the questions. Sorry. If you don't mind asking or answering a couple of these, let me go back to Camille. Do you think emoji will be accepted in academic institutions or formal organizations in the future? How do you think the future of emoji will be? So I'm going to try to answer this in many different ways. So from an academic standpoint, there is a lot of academic research across many different fields. Like obviously there's linguistics, there's sociology, there is computer science. Psychology was one. So we actually, I help run a conference, an academic conference every year or academic workshop probably every year. And we asked for submissions from all fields. And what's so interesting is to see the vast diversity of top areas where people are thinking about emoji, like whether or not emoji and race, like there was a great paper looking at the use of skin tone emojis with hand gestures and like which ones, which emoji, what the distribution for the skin colors were for each emoji like hand gestures, I think. So it turns out there was for thumbs up and like the fist, those skewed actually more towards the darker skin tones relative to like the average distribution. In terms of formal organizations, I will give one example, which is that a couple of years ago, the New York Times started using emoji in its headlines, which is really as, I've been reported there for a long time. So for them to decide that, I think is sort of one of the benchmarks of like something becoming very official. And it's not just the New York Times. I think there've been a couple, I think USA Today might have done it at a certain point, but what was interesting when I saw that article in the New York Times, you could see it on the Times website, but when Google crawled the website, I guess didn't have the ability to like save an emoji character in a headline. So when it displayed it in like the Google Newsy part, it dropped the emoji from the headline. So in many ways, I do think that emoji are becoming very like part of the establishment and institutionalized in ways that we, Uniga probably would not have imagined when they first kind of standardized them back in 2010-ish. Another question, we have quite a few in here. Do different countries have their own emoji? For example, in Israel, are there Orthodox Jewish emojis? So one, right now, there is one universal Unicode system for emojis. So in terms of what is technically an emoji, and the way I like to say it is like, can you send it in the subject line of an email as a sort of kind of filter? Like, so it's different from sending a sticker or one of those an emoji type things that Apple has made very popular in recent years. There right now is one global system in part because for better or for worse, the digital communications in the world is dominated by handful large US tech companies, right? It's Microsoft. It is Microsoft, Android, or at Google, Apple. There's some companies out of China that actually have had their own ecosystems. But as a result, they like to do things in a very standardized way. That being said, if you kind of Google Taiwan flag in China, I've never seen this firsthand because I haven't been in China, but my understanding is that you cannot use the Taiwan flag in the China version of the iOS operating or in iOS. So you one can't even see it on your keyboard if you want to send it. And when someone kind of sends it to you, you get I think a blank box. So I think that's really significant for many reasons. Obviously, if that is true, it partially responds to government pressure. But in terms of the underlying emoji system in theories unified, but obviously different countries have different reactions to what they want or don't want their citizens to see. So for example, Russia a couple of years ago got, I mean, Russia, the government actually got very historical about the gay family emoji that was sort of added to the keyboards because they considered it, I think homosexual propaganda to youth. And there was a big kerfuffle that was covered in the press at that time. And you can see, so it's tricky trying to come up with a common unified system across entire world visually when they're different kind of senses of what isn't appropriate socially in different cultures. Have there been emoji that have been removed from circulation? Yeah, so this sort of kind of speaks to what I mentioned before that once an emoji always an emoji that you can never remove the underlying code because once unicode encodes something, it exists in everything that was like previously encoded. And so they can only build upwards, not down because otherwise you would break things that were written in like a previous version of unicode. But that being said, what unicode has or not unicode, what the vendors have done. So this is not unicode, but it's like the Apple's Microsoft Googles of the world. They can revamp whatever image that is associated with that description of an emoji. So I mentioned the gun. Another one is the vaccine. So for the syringe, sorry, it's actually technically it's a syringe emoji. And for a long time it was just like a blood drops on the syringe. And because worldwide we are now very, very focused on syringes and vaccines. The revamped version is sort of a no blood. So it looks much more neutral and it's supposed to be vaccine. Likewise, there was always a mask emoji. This also speaks to the Japanese legacies. They love wearing masks. And when it used to be slightly sad, if you go back and you look at sort of earlier versions of iOS and others, you know, it's sort of sad. But in the new version, if you look at your keyboards these days, it's a smiling emoji that just happens to be wearing a mask. So it is very happy about the fact that it's wearing a mask these days. So you can revamp the images that are associated with it. And that's actually, you know, that happens on these sort of piecemeal basises, but also like generationally, you just see an entire like visual upgrade. It happened once I think in 2016, when it went from like older versions to like the more realistic ones that we see on Apple today. Can you track emoji usage? Like one of the top 10 most popular emoji and most popular. So there's a lot of different statistical tracking of emoji usages. So one is a little bit out of date, but very popular for a while was emoji tracker. I think it's emoji tracker.com, which is basically looked on what emoji we're being used at on Twitter for a while. And I actually don't know if they fully updated it. For a while, there was kind of getting out of date. So any kind of super new emoji wouldn't be included in the system because just the way that they had hard coded, it was sort of like a fixed moment in time. I think there was enough pressure. I hope they've updated it. So that's one. The other thing is the platforms themselves actually have also upgraded, also keep track both, I think on a real time basis and maybe as a sort of like over a longer period of time. So there is actually a chart that they update not every year, cause that's like pretty hard. Let's say like every two years that looks at emoji frequency. And so one of the most interesting things is faced with tears of joy. The one that has like smiling, but also crying. Very strange, people love it. It's actually worse as a, you know, a couple of years ago, 9.9% of all emoji sent was that one emoji, which I think is like absolutely stunning. Cause it does certainly just represent my emoji usage. And then number two was heart, the red heart. So those were like, and that was at six. So 10% was just like faced with tears of joy. Then came the heart emoji. And then like, and then it's total power law down. Like those two like stand out and then it falls really, really rapidly. So we are in the midst of updating the most recent statistics because every year when you add a new emoji, you want to see how they're doing. Like, are we doing a good job of adding emoji to people are actually using? You know, I am of the school of thought that every emoji has its day. Like we helped pass what the microbe emoji back in 2016 because just as part of a scientific set that we did with GE. And, you know, it was kind of hanging out on the emoji keyboard. No one's really paying attention to it. And then like, bam, like 2020 it was a year of like, you know, it's kind of just like microbe slash, you know, virus emoji. Likewise, you know, soap, we had passed soap wasn't doing that much for a long time. But then like when we were really emphasizing washing our hands in the early days of COVID, you know, lockdown soap emoji selling became really, really popular as well. So, you know, I, there are different philosophies of thought on, you know, emoji passage. So one is like, we should just do more of what they want. They like, they like to use smiley faces. They like to use hand gestures. They like to use hearts. They like to use flowers. So we should like favor those. And, you know, whereas I think every, every emoji can have a shot. Like it can have it stay in the sun, but you just need the situation for when it's and let me come as like very popular and in demand. Great. So I'm going to ask one more question. And this one I was also going to, I was thinking about too, where did the emoji fit into this paradigm? So I assume we were talking about the emoji that Apple allows for customization. That became, I don't know, very popular, but was introduced a couple of years ago. And this is part of a larger phenomenon where like people can take like little images of that represent themselves and customize them. So it's not just the emoji where, you know, you basically can like shape your hair and your in glasses and your eye color and like, you know, whether or not you have, you know, wrinkles or not, whatnot. You can also do it on like Bitmoji. Like my sister used to send me a lot of Bitmoji of like herself kind of like saying, hooray, your happy birthday and all that kind of stuff. So what we, as I mentioned before, what we were seeing and I'm sure the, you know, Apple and Google as companies were seeing was this a huge demand that people really wanted to customize their emoji for them. And honestly, Unicode is not the way to go through it because of just, I mean, had we known maybe they would have designed the system a long time ago, but just a combinatoric like growth of like hair color and gender and like skin tone and eye color would have been just absolutely explosive. So I think Memoji was the platform, Memoji like things where the platform's way of trying to address that demand without going through the laborious process of getting like a sort of framework approved in Unicode. So I think, you know, and that takes sort of offloads the pressure on Unicode to do like variations. Like, you know, we have, so you have like bearded emoji and we have white haired emoji, but do we need a white haired bearded emoji? You know that kind of thing where you start just combining things that gets pretty like Terry. So whereas, you know, Memoji, they're not actually emoji, they're just like stickers. They're just like random images, but then they're generated through selection that you make and then they have like, they can be used with emoji like expressions, you know, the heart eyes or like the head exploding or like, you know, the, it's another really good one, like smiley or the face with tears of joy. What I think is really interesting is you see the smiley face emoji as templates, their actions, their emotions, but then your backwards filling them into just normal humans again. Thank you very much. So there's a couple other questions that we didn't get to, but maybe you can answer them in the Q&A, Jennifer, but really appreciate your being here and for shutting light on emoji. And thank you, Andrea, for also talking about our collection and collecting those emoji. So that was your exploration and your discovery. So thank you for that. And so we look forward to seeing you all at the next event in September and we'll be sending out a link probably sometime in August. So thank you.