 Hi everyone and welcome to this conversation on all things emoji. We're coming to you from Future Tense, which is a partnership of Slate Magazine, New America and Arizona State University that looks at the intersection of policy, society and technology. I'm Tori Bosch, the editor of Future Tense and I'm so excited to be here. I wish I could show you an emoji to really capture that excitement because I think so many times they do capture those kinds of emotions and gestures better than words can. After I introduce our wonderful speakers will spend about 45 minutes discussing some of the questions that surround the creation and governance of emoji, and then we'll open it up to Q&A. So you can submit your questions at any point in our discussion. So first we have Gretchen McCulloch, who is an internet linguist who explores the language of the internet for the people of the internet. She's the author of the New York Times bestselling book because internet understanding the new rules of language, which was published in 2019 and was named a best book of the year by Time, Amazon and the Washington Post. Gretchen also writes the resident linguist column at Wired and has written for the New York Times, New York Magazine, Slate, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The Toast, which is dear to my heart. She has a master's in linguistics from McGill University and has spoken at South by Southwest and Emojicon. She's also the creator of the Daily Linguistics podcast, All Things Linguistic, and the co-creator of Lingthusiasm, a podcast that is enthusiastic about linguistics. And then we have Jennifer Daniel, who is the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee Chair, which is a very enviable title for anyone to have. Her first contribution to Unicode was standardizing gender inclusive representations in emoji. She was a former graphics editor at the New York Times and is co-author and illustrator of a number of graphics books, including How To Be Human, Space, Exclamation Point, and The Origins of Almost Everything. Her work has been recognized by the Walker Art Museum, Society of Illustrators, and published in The New Yorker, The Washington Post, and Time Magazine, just to name a few. So thank you both for being here with future events today. I'd like to start by asking you if you each have a favorite lesser used emoji. We're going for the deep cuts. Okay. Well, so one that occurs to me is the sailboat emoji, which has a particular meaning in a few of my friend groups. So, and a few friend slacks and discords that I'm in, we have a channel called Wining on the Yacht. And this is when you have some sort of problem that's almost too trivial to complain about. But you still want to complain about, and sort of the archetypal example is, I'm here on this yacht, I have this nice free drink, and the ice cubes in it are my preferred style of ice cubes. And so it's the sort of, you know, self-reflexive annoyance, and particularly good yacht wines are awarded a yacht, a sailboat emoji. So it's got this sort of in-group meeting with that particular friend group. That's delightful, Jennifer. How about you? I will say I've never heard anyone talk about using any of the transportation emojis, so you already win on identifying. I have been taken to the natural disaster emoji lately. So the volcano, when I have big strong feelings, or the tornado plus basically any emoji. So tornado poop when I'm describing my kids, or tornado, I don't even know, coffee when I'm guzzling it in the morning. So yeah, I've been using nature, a lot of nature these days. I love that the tornado is sort of emphatic modifier, which is I'm sure not the technical term, but how I will think about it. Sounds very technical to me. So also one quick question is I want to get the language right here. Is the plural emoji or emojis? Emoji. That's a fun question. For me, it depends on what you're trying to signal. So people who are trying to signal like they like emoji specialization or an awareness of emojis roots in Japan, use unmarked emoji without the s. And people who are anglicizing it more intensely use emojis with the s because they're thinking like this is completely adapted into my vocabulary. This is something that I'm just using. I'm not thinking about as a Japanese thing like it's English for me. It sort of depends on what you want to signal. Jennifer is a deep cut emoji specialist and she's going to say emoji as the plural doesn't surprise me at all. But there are also people who use emojis. We used emojis recently on a project that I was working on because we wanted to signal like young approach ability to a younger audience. So it really depends on what you're what you're trying to signal. I will try to use emoji in this but I cannot promise I won't slip up with an emoji. You use what feels good to you. I actually didn't realize why I like emoji. That's just the standard that which people around you. That's what Unicode people say. Well, so now that I know I should be at least in this context, perhaps saying emoji. Jennifer, could you tell us a little bit about sort of how the Unicode subcommittee works? How does a tornado become an emoji? Well, one day when two people love each other very much, they get together and they write a proposal for a tornado. I mean, a lot of emoji have lots of different origins. I suppose if you wanted to make like if we were talking about a specific emoji like how a specific emoji came into being, we could talk about one. I'm trying to think of a good one. But of course, nothing comes to mind. There's tears of joy. I mean, there's obviously the tears of joy. It's nice when you have like a specific one in mind versus like all of them possibly be. Tears of joy was one of those smiley faces that everyone types with regular punctuation, just colon, comma or apostrophe, dash and then per in, but it didn't exist an emoji. So it was sort of one of those things where the best emoji are ones that are really obvious where you're just like, that was an emoji. I swear that was an emoji, but it was never emoji. So you kind of start looking to see how people are currently using it. Is it being currently used? Fortunately, it is because it's made of punctuation. And you can kind of compare it to other punctuation smileys, right? Just convert to the regular smiley or the frowny smiley or a number of other kinds and through different measuring like you could use video or search results or image results, any kind of way of measuring how people are using it online and see, okay, how does this, oh, it's actually more people are using this sequence of punctuation. And then, I mean, I'm already talking about like the criteria for inclusion now but basically you want to get a sense of the frequency of use that isn't rhetorical, like it's actually grounded in reality. And it's been happening for a long time. It's not just like happening this year, or even kind of this decade. You really want to go back decades of how people have been using it. And then Unicode has a whole document about submitting emoji proposals. I don't think we have to go line by line but the most important parts of them really are around frequency of use and multiple uses and how it'll be used with other emoji. I want to get a sense of, this is an emoji, is this emoji flexible, like language? Like, can it be, is it just going to mean literally I'm crying while I'm smiling? No, no, no, it's going to mean so much more than that. It's going to really express things how you feel, not just actually how you can sort your face and leak water out of your eyes, right? It's going to actually bring you somewhere more metaphorical. And then how it's used with other emojis is really important because you want to add new emoji to operate and expand how we use them generally and specifically, like my example of the tornado, right? Like how can it be used other emoji to bring me somewhere more me, right? It doesn't just mean one thing. And there's a number of other criteria as well. And I think that's one of the things that people sometimes don't think about with respect to Unicode is that once Unicode adds a symbol, whether it's an emoji or a, you know, punctuation character or anything else, they never remove it. And so if we add something that's like a big trend this year, it's just why, you know, there are no, no actual people who become emoji because even if this year we want like this pop star who we're all a fan of to become an emoji, like in 10 years or 20 years or 50 years, people are going to be like, why, why? So they don't even open that can of worms because if something's too evanescent, then it, you know, that's a problem. So like at a really basic level, what does it mean for Unicode to add an emoji? Like what, what does that kickstart? How does it go from Unicode deciding to add it to it showing up on my iPhone? Well, I, I work on Android, so I couldn't tell you about the phone, but I can tell you about Unicode. Unicode is, think of Unicode as your, your friendly plumber. They lay, they lay the plumbing down so that folks at Apple or Google or Twitter or whoever can then fill those pipes with emoji. They effectively, everything when you read something online, you know, the letter A is assigned a code point so it always, you can reliably know that you're going to be reading the letter A. And emoji operate the same way. It's effectively a font. They're not little tiny images that you, you know, that are animated like bitmap, right, by our GIF. They're, they're, they're a font and they're assigned a code point, which makes them lightweight. It also means that's why you can insert them anywhere there's a text field online. And so once there's a code point, once those data files are released, really, it's just, you know, off the races, you know, it's basically anyone who, who wants to, there's no, you don't have to, but if you want to, you now have a code point that can be assigned an image that will reliably look like that image when you send it to someone else and it's that interoperability that really makes Unicode good. Honestly, like what they're doing is a service to all of us. Like we can actually send not just emoji to emoji to someone, but we can send something of Arabic to someone else and they can read it in Arabic, which wasn't possible before Unicode came along. And that's really their mission is to digitize the world's languages in some meaningful way so that we can continue doing. It's kind of like to continue your plumbing metaphor. Like, it's like how the electricity as it arrives in your house is sort of standardized and you have like a certain type of jack that you can plug all your devices into. And so you can plug in like any sort of device into that jack, but you know the electricity company is giving you like a particular kind of electricity so that all of your devices can work with that. So it's, it's sort of that invisible like internet plumbing that people mean Unicode consortium existed since the 1980s right so people haven't paid as much attention to until emoji started. You know, it's, and I think the emoji for bringing that to our attention because it is something that's really difficult for people to sort of understand is this architecture that supports our ability to communicate with with one another. So Unicode will create sort of the font essentially but then every platform will implement it a little bit differently so could you talk a little bit about how much you Unicode want standardization across, say Slack iPhone and Android or other ways that platforms can maybe create problems or opportunities there. I mean, it's, it's called the Unicode standard, right they create guidelines, but they're not the police. You know, they're they're just here to like say this is what you guys should do. This is what it should be here's an example. We spent two years vetting it. You know, be fruitful and multiply right. And so I would say less about what it's not necessarily, I mean, I care about it as part of the subcommittee, but I would say that the group as a whole cares deeply about it. And in the past, I'm not sure before I was involved, I'm not sure how much they did care about it. I think it was more like, thank you Unicode, we will accept this gift that you have given us and then they went off and they did what they did with it. You know they aligned it to their brand or they, they shoved it in their keyboards or you know some people embraced it other people kept it at a distance but they kind of just did their own thing. And then they were like, wait, oh, oh this isn't a moment for branding. This is actually communication, and it matters when you send something X to and it looks like X. I think for the past couple years you've really seen a reconciliation there where people are aligning more in a meaningful way so that you when you're sending something you're here. Yeah, and I think I actually think that's in the past couple of years that's mostly been addressed, at least for the most frequently used about you. I think that users really hate it when I send something from my Android and they shows up as a completely different looking emotion on my friends iPhone and like, but I wasn't trying to be sarcastic I was trying to be sad for you. People really hate that. And I think vendors in the past two years have been realizing that. When I first joined I was like, I didn't understand the, the fragmentation at all, you know I was like, when I was like, oh just gonna look at all the emoji and do an audit get a like a sense of like what this ecosystem looks like and I was like, what. What. What was a lot of this is, and you know what it was easily fixed. That's the thing is like actually it was. You need to talk to you. Go just go talk. Nice to meet you like you never met before you kidding. You know it's just like anything else any other relationship it's just about, you know, meeting and figuring it out. I mean it's fun to look at who's hamburger puts the tomato underneath the patty rather on top so it's yeah it's a, it's nice to see like a small a bit of a diversity and how the platforms integrate them while keeping things consistent enough yet to, to communicate what you want. I think it's a big difference between what people do with what what the platforms do with the object emoji versus what they do with the sort of face emoji. And that's where like the face emoji need to align really precisely because this eyebrow is like slightly different on this platform versus this other platform. It can create a really different emotional interpretation, whereas you say like the exact styling of the hamburger or like the exact ingredients in the salad or like what color the fish is like what the birthday cake looks like. Those are areas where you know it doesn't necessarily matter exactly how many candles you have on this one birthday cake versus other birthday cake, because the, you know, like people people aren't using the object emoji for as precise meanings in some cases as they're using the face ones. Well, we're also like biologically ingrained to read people's faces, like micro expressions and so like we are paying attention to the details of the smiley's in a way that we're not the burger. You know what I mean. I mean, maybe, maybe food I'd be curious about how we look at food and how you know how the brain what part of the brain is activated but the smiley's really are where it's most I would totally agree. I mean the smiley's, you know, in some ways are sort of the original emoji, as you said, but it feels like smiley's faces people are where things can get the most tricky in terms of representation, as well as in terms of interpretation. I mean, could you talk a little bit about how representation and emoji have changed over recent years. And I have a pretty different philosophy around additions that, let's open it this way. I think there have been efforts to increase a sense of inclusion, but they didn't result in more diversity. And so largely what I've been trying to do is find ways to make things more broad and less specific. So the gender inclusive work largely wasn't about adding a third gender that would be alienating a great deal of other types of genders. It's about adding a concept of a spectrum of gender, and that is much more broad than distinctly male or female. It's about trying to kind of play in a space rather than specifically say this, this looks like me. This is more this is representative and makes it is what I feel like. And I think that's, that's really important is that the emoji aren't meant to literally reproduce reality, but effectively let you play with language just the way you like you play with your own identity. This gets a little bit to something that you've talked about as well, which is that like emoji are not words, right, you know, what exact function do you see them using instead of like a literal translation of what we see there. The way that I like to talk about how emoji function communication and this is a real whole paper about this with with Lauren gone who is also a mutual friend of me and Jennifer, and is emoji as a type of gesture or emoji is having a similar function as gesture even though sometimes there's this very obvious one to one mapping you know you have a thumbs up emoji you have a you have a peace sign you have, you know, like all of these different kinds of literal you know cross fingers physical shapes, but there's also a sense that when you look at how people use emoji, they're often doing it as an accompaniment to words, whether that someone else said this thing and I send back a smiley face in reply, or like a laughing emoji I send that back and reply, or I say this thing and I add a few emoji at the end or sort of the context in which I wanted to be interpreted, you know, so if I say, good job, versus if I say, you know, good job and flip someone off which maybe I'm not going to do on this family friendly stream. Then that one of those is sarcastic right one of our good job with the eye roll of OG, which is family friendly. One of those is more sarcastic than the other and I can do that with physical gestures in in space and broaden the scope of interpretation for what I'm saying, and I can also do that with how gestures in how emoji influence the context of what I'm saying about about the words that I'm producing. And I think that this sort of explains some of the usage patterns that we see in emoji for one thing people really like repeating an emoji, you know, you have like, you know, the top emoji strings a few years ago when I was looking into this were tears of joy tears of joy as like number one tears of joy tears of joy tears of joy as number two, and tears of joy tears of joy tears of joy tears of three. And, you know, and then you go down and you find other other strings of repetition or even when it's not sort of simple repetition like the exact same emoji, it'll be like complex repetition like parts of different colors. And so you're still doing something it's very sort of repetitive in spirit. And that's not really how people use language most of the time, you know, here I am saying words. And there are a bunch of different words that are sort of derogated, right? It's, it's not that I'm just going to say emoji, emoji, emoji, emoji, emoji, emoji, emoji, emoji, emoji, emoji, emoji, emoji. I mean, I could do that but that would be sort of a performance piece. Yeah, sorry, I've actually been bugging you. That's how I got that clip. But, you know, so but when it comes to emoji, you do see a lot of that repetition. And yet gestures are an area where you do see what see what researchers call beat gestures so I'm going like, Okay, here's what's going on. This is me doing the same hand shape in a repetitive beat And that seems to be more like what's going on in the emoji domain, we do see a lot of repetition in gestures. And the other thing is it from the kind of other spectrum, there's the sort of naturalistic emoji use of like, Okay, I'm going to add a few emoji to influence the context of why you want something to be interpreted, or if someone's talking I can give like a nod or a, Oh, wow, you know, shaking your head, and that sort of the emoji reaction to what someone else is saying. And then on the other end of the spectrum, people do play games with gestures, you know, people play charades, people play like, you know, acting out, you know, sort of pantomime type games with gestures, and people play those sorts of games with emoji where it's like, Oh, I'm going to retell the Fresh Prince of Bel Air theme song in emoji. But it's that's a playful function. It's not, I'm going to, you know, stop using letters. I think it's very clear, you know, many years into emoji being widely available on our phones that people haven't stopped using letters, because emoji have shown up. And so the emoji stories are a playful thing, they're not a replacement for, you know, your workaday communication. Tony mentioned that I don't know if either of you have read The Unseen World by Liz Moore, which is a novel that's about AI and ethics and it's really, really wonderful but I mentioned it and I was going to bring it up anyway because in the book, far in the future, the main character is now an older academic who talks about how younger people only communicate in what they call glyphs, which seem to be like an evolved version of emoji and young people have to tutor the old people and only use words, you know, as a sort of soft to the older people so you don't see it heading in that direction. No, no, no, no. Like, it's a cute science fiction device but it's like time travel. It's like, oh, that was fun. But no, like, no, because the thing is, is like there are languages with different writing systems. But first of all, for a society to transition to a different writing system. That's, that's possible, you know, in Turkey and I think the 1920s they transferred from an Arabic based alphabet to a Roman based alphabet. You know, this is a thing that's happened in various places. But it's this sort of massive infrastructural issue that requires a lot of like state support and you have to reprint all your books. And even that is not as big of a wholesale change. So like, we could, you know, switch out and stop using the Roman alphabet but we would still be speaking English using it. And I mean, I challenge anybody who thinks this is a real possibility to spend like 10 minutes trying to actually do it. Just like, okay, great. So for the next, you know, the next time you're trying to text with someone send text only an emoji, and it turns into this guessing game where the other person's like using words to guess what they're trying what you're trying to say. And, you know, like, it's just, no, it's so it's rock on so many levels. I mean, I guess, oh, sorry, go ahead, Jennifer. Oh, no, I was just gonna just briefly piggyback what you mentioned in your book, Gretchen, the idea of emoji being co-speech. I think you even credit that to why it's, it has maintained popularity because it isn't its own language. It works with all the other languages and because it interplays, that allows it to sustain and fill in the gaps that plain text is not sufficient and conveying all the examples that she provided. Right. And so there are moments for like, weird owl moments of play being playful with language, right, where you can do with words and you can be playful with emoji in that way and make it more of a party game. Sure. But effectively, when you're telling someone, you know, like, where are you, I can't find you and you want to convey some sense of urgency, you're not going to have them guess how you feel, right, like, you want them to have an immediate read of it. Yeah. And like, it turns out it's actually really hard to give people to learn a new language. And people, you know, people find it difficult, they find it challenging, you have all this vocabulary to memorize, like, and it has not actually been hard to give people to adopt emoji. Like, technological implementation wise, there have been challenges, but people can see an emoji and be like, oh yeah, I'm going to start using this. And they don't actually need, like, the thing that's useful about language is you can communicate beyond the here and now. And it's not just like, I'm going to like point to a bunch of different objects. It's, I can talk about abstract ideas, you know, I can talk about, you know, I can talk about this question of like, how do emoji work. And that's a sort of broad question. You can't talk about an emoji. There is no emoji for emoji. Why does the ABCD emoji talk about emoji? Those are letters. Those are letters. It doesn't belong to be an emoji. That's all the things that needs to be. Why does it exist? It doesn't exist and it's not an emoji. It's just a bunch of letters. Yeah, like it's, and, you know, people have tried to make, you know, universal languages and stuff like that. But the things that are really sort of interesting and exciting about emoji in many cases are either the stuff that's very deliberately not linguistic, like, these, all these facial expressions that are hard to describe in words and the unicode names for them sound kind of silly, because they're not conveying the same thing. Or it's something like, oh, here's the eggplant and someone has to tell you what that means and it doesn't mean that for everybody. You have to be sort of inducted into the society of people who know what the eggplant emoji means. So, you know, the stuff that's really exciting about emoji is all of the stuff that's sort of non-obvious. Yeah, that should get to something I think about a lot. Well, so in May there's a horrifying conversation on Slate's Slack, in which I learned that several of my colleagues use the slightly smiling face, mostly as a kind of screw you, rather than as a smiley face. And some of them seem to be surprised that everyone didn't see it that way. And I was realizing I might have been telling people screw you when I just meant to communicate some warmth. I mean, so are there ways in which the malleability and the way the meaning of an emoji change between person to person can create problems? I mean, are there ways to sort of navigate those misunderstandings between emojis? I think that, you know, that's a very passive aggressive use of an emoji, right? And it's a sort of sarcastic or double meaning use of emoji. And there are also, you know, sarcastic or passive aggressive punctuation or particular words, you know, I've had everyone completely disagrees about email signoffs, you know, there are lots of different, you know, some people are like, if I say best, that means I hate you and some people are like, but obviously you just say best, it's like an ordinary thing to say. And so there's a sense in which, okay, if you're going to use something as a sort of subtle nod to passive aggression, that for you and a few people you know is passive aggressive, you need to expect that in an internet context where you're communicating with a bunch of people from different backgrounds and different understandings of things that not everyone is going to receive the exact subtleties of the passive aggression that you are trying to convey. And in some cases that sort of plausible deniability is actually what people are aiming for. So, if I know that I'm being passive aggressive when I sign an email sincerely, and I also know the other person will not necessarily be able to put their finger on why it seems a little bit hostile, or maybe they'll interpret it as if I was being positive. That's this sort of private intro with myself that I can have. And it does sometimes the failure in communication is the point or the plausible deniability of it is the point, because I did a lot of research into the sarcasm literature for for because internet as well. And one of the things that's really interesting is that sarcasm is a linguistic trust fall. You can you express sarcasm, even in sort of gold standard like face to face full bandwidth communication. Sarcasm always involves two parts one of them is the stating of the sarcasm and the other is acknowledgement on the part of the recipient that you've received the sarcasm and you've acknowledged it as such. And sarcasm can go wrong, even in that full bandwidth face to face communication. So, of course it can go wrong online because, you know, once you remove a little bit of that bandwidth and things have had the potential for miscommunication more and anything that's sarcastic or passive aggressive or ironic is a when someone gets it when someone understands your sarcasm for what it is. They're signaling that they're a member of a similar sort of speech community as you are. And when someone doesn't get it to signal that they're sort of an outsider. But if you want, you know, we communicate with so many people across different groups. If you want people to really get an overt message, you need to actually say it. And if you want to convey something really subtle, you need to accept the possibility that your message could be misinterpreted, which sometimes is the point but it's. I think we've, you know, there are enough emoji that have double meanings and sarcasm and like additional layers of interpretation that I don't think any one person knows all of the possible meanings in that space and I think it's unrealistic to expect that that everyone's just going to come with this knowledge. And there's a great moment in the Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, a few months ago, in which there was a massive argument about whether a thumbs up emoji meant FU and I highly recommend watching it for the plausible deniability reasons. Right, exactly. A particular smiley face is there have been studies demographically about different interpretations of emoji. And so, for example, I forget the name of the study I wish I could cite it. I believe they showed that emoji to a number of folks in China. And they're like, what does this mean to you right and they're like, don't trust that person. They look like they're humoring me. I wouldn't that is not, that is not a smiley evidence. But you show it to another group of individuals, perhaps yourself and they're like, seems pleasant. They seem they seem trustworthy. I trust that person. And so you see that both culturally, you'd see it with age like younger folks tend to use the, the more Edward monk kind of looking one to say surprise, whereas older folks use that to mean being scared. And so, an important part of emoji is that they are alongside words, so the words can clarify that intent. Right, so if you're using it in a way that's sincere, that should hopefully be able to be conveyed in that message. And to Gretchen's point, if it's being used sarcastically, hopefully you have a relationship with that person know their sense of humor that it would be used sarcastically. And with other sort of pragmatic particles as well I mean you talk about this also in your, your book Gretchen but just like anything that can indicate to the recipient that you're just, you just understand them you just get them you just you you're chill. You, you're on the same page here and emoji do a lot of a heavy lifting there just to connect because you're physically not in the same place. Yeah, if you're communicating with someone on a regular basis to have a sense of sort of what their baseline norms are like oh this person always ends their text with the period or this person never ends their text with the period and so when they do something that's different from what their baseline is and we sort of develop a sense of this without thinking about it too hard. When they do something that's different you're like oh maybe they have their driving and someone else is using their phone to reply back to my text, or maybe they're they're trying to communicate some sort of additional level of I think one of the things that I try to encourage people to do is have sort of open ended exploratory curious conversations about what something means for a person in that context. So, it's not that one way has to be right and one has to be wrong or that like just because some people in one group are using an emoji in a particular way means that you need to necessarily change what you're doing if you're mostly hanging out in a different group of people. It's, we can have these meta level conversations about how we're using emoji, and find out what someone means by it because you can't possibly can take, you know, make a permanent directory of what all of them mean because this is changing, but that's okay you have this sort of conversations like oh what did you mean by this in this context, or figuring out what someone's using based on based on other kind of kinds of context and I think that's sort of a more expansive definition that I would also like to have people approach to to language and to other kinds of communication where we're sort of having this attitude of curiosity about what people mean. Jennifer you talked about how when Unicode is deciding which emoji to adopt you look at how people are using it in conversation so does this sort of like metaphorical use come up much I mean how do you like when you're exploring whether to add one how are you thinking about the different ways people might use the same symbol. We try not to get theoretical like how could they use it right it's more like how are they using it. We do try to anticipate things like abuse, for example, but I think most of it is grounded in how is it being used because it's just, I mean, language is unstoppable a human mind interacting with each other you know like they will determine what it means not like not the consortium the consortium just like recognizes already being used. But yeah the multiple uses is super is super relevant because you don't want to add something that is only singular in nature. And that's a tricky question when it comes to something like Unicode because people can't use a Unicode based emoji in all of the context in which they might want to use it until it's already encoded. So like a dictionary can say okay, most people are making words in English or the same 26 letters. Let's see what let's see what new words people have come up with this year that we should be adding to our, you know, Mary and Webster or Oxford or any of the dictionaries they can apply on what people are doing with a finite set of combinatorial things. And with emoji that's more difficult because there are places where people can use different kinds of custom emoji, you know, platforms like slack and discord, where users can upload small images, and then they're usable within that particular platform for a particular set of users, which, you know, I wish we had more data about how people were using custom emoji there, because I think it's a really interesting place of like what are people doing in the ability to upload any tiny image, which ones are really common. I, we don't have data on this yet, but it would be really interesting to find out. And it is sort of a more challenging proposition to say, well, what would people use in a tiny image, but they don't have the ability to send it yet. Well, I don't think you have to be restricted to digital spaces, right, you just look at how people already communicate just like you and I, Tory right now or in pop culture or in manga or in graph in any, any sort of visual ephemera. You can be like, okay, when people are feeling like this, it's too much, there's too much happening, their faces all melt, like you just like don't you melt into a puddle you see it. You see it in a comic all the way to Looney Tunes have been using that sort of visual morphine for over 100 years. You can then say, okay, this is a very well established visual representation of feeling. And then it can graduate to the point of it scaling and digital spaces, but I don't think it has to have digital origins. It really is just about how we, how things exist in the world. And again, not trying to reproduce them because the example like my face is melting off but it's like how I feel, and how is that being represented. Yeah, that's a good point. So if there's a, you know, gift that's really popular for particular emotion or there's, you know, something that's used as a convention in cartoon spaces that and be like, okay, or, or something that's already being used as a gesture. I know the Manawa Bursa gesture, which is the sort of Italian gesture that you that you do was recently added to Unicode. And that's a gesture that was already common. It has a name in Italian. And you could use this sort of handshape for other types of things like that's the shape the hands can make even if you don't have the Manawa Bursa gesture as your as an English speaker necessarily, but that's something that's sort of established in a, at least one cultural context. Yeah, I think you can even cite written language examples like the smile with tear like that that happens in Shakespeare Shakespeare talks about people smiling with tears you know it has happened in like the Odyssey. You know, like, they talk, you know, like, there are examples of that expression that have existed throughout literature that you can quote even though it's, it's up to your imagination to imagine like how that might might look. So it gives feel a little bit to transient sometimes because they kind of meant to like be swapped like that but I do think that everything like if I remember the first emoji proposal I wrote that was declined was I was to represent existentialism. That sounds easy. I like to go with the first, you know, how people are kind of forced themselves to look inward. And it's really that it's in throughout art history of a person looking in a mirror. You have like old ancient stories about it you have Alice in Wonderland, you have just like the whole bathroom selfie thing more in contemporary kind of a way to like, you know, and but that's more extracurricular kind of identity. I didn't get past but that is the kind of reference like I'm not looking to see how are people sending pick, you know, like pictures of themselves in a mirror. Like, people are deeply existential, I know that existed for a long time. How, how has that been represented and then. And then even if you end up if person looking in mirror ends up succeeding and getting proposed that doesn't really mean people will use it as existentialism maybe they'll use it for vanity or something instead but it is at least some, you know, portion of the spectrum of human emotion. That's right when someone looks at it, even if they don't know it is what it is, but they understand how to use it. Like the motto emoji, I think folks from Argentina know exactly what that is someone from Iowa does it and they're like oh it's a coconut drink. I can use it as a coconut drink you know like for them, they've been able to derive meaning from it, and it's okay that it doesn't mean what someone else in the world thinks it means because they're not talking to that person. They're just talking to their buddy, you know, whoever who also thinks it's a coconut drink and so it really is just effectively like the beginning of this conversation, making sure that you're not being misunderstood, and you're using it in a way that other people understand you. Jennifer, what do you have like a sense of how many proposals, the committee gets and how many are approved in a given year say, I don't think we share those numbers. But it's, it's, it's a lot. A lot of proposals and fewer accepted I assume. Right so the see we have reduced the number of emojis accepted to around 38 year. And how would you say that maybe the, I should mention to that we're going to head to Q&A in two or three minutes so start thinking about your questions for Gretchen and Jennifer. What's the sense of sort of like how a batch of 30 has changed over the years, particularly since you became involved. Sure, yeah. So I became the subcommittee chair 2019, like late 2019. A lot of what I was witnessing externally like just as a person who uses emoji, that is someone who works at a company that is responsible for making the emoji. And then someone on the committee reviewing the proposals that we were way over indexing on rhetorical possibilities and and not enough on actually how people use emoji. And so we crafted a whole strategy last. So we think we published it in 2020 April time around how we were changing our process a little bit that we, we want to focus on things that are more useful that have evidence of that utility to reduce the number of emoji we actually do I think previously where it was closer to 60. And that again is because there's so many on the keyboard as we add more we are creating zones of exclusion without consciously trying. And so when there's less to encode that puts more pressure on those 30 to be the best 30, not just like the first 30 that came across our desk, which could was happening previously where it was just like, Oh, this one's good. This one's good. This one's good. And then we just move forward. And then we slightly modified our process in pursuit of that of those goals and that process is mostly just holding ourselves accountable to the criteria for inclusion that you write in your proposal. So when you say zones of exclusion meaning that some things are just buried too deep in the keyboard for anyone to find and then realistically use. No, I mean how much time do we have, I think we're trying to do Q&A soon but I would say like, you know we used to just have martini glass emoji, and that was supposed to represent bar, or going out for a drink, you know you see it at international airports right just old martini glass. But now we have like whiskey, a tumblr glass and my tie and I don't know how many other alcoholic drinks we have a number of drinks. There's wine glass but the wine glass is conventionally depicted with red wine and so this is question of like well should there also be white wine. And at a certain point, it might have been almost simpler if there was only martini glass that represented all of the alcohol, rather than sort of trying to get into the entire menu of like, you know the rocks glass has a brown drink in it but what if it had like, but why don't people who drink vodka or like a gin and tonic what does that look like. I don't want to reproduce the entire possible menu for a bar in emoji because they've got like 30, 50 alcohol emoji and that's you know and you could and you could go down that rabbit hole for every single domain. It's just menu is fallacy right and you do that with the animals as well you can do that with any category where you can't month but you don't have score all right but emoji sizes they're kind they can be used you can your imagination can in the context of the text also let you know what you're talking about. And maybe the drinks are a bad example because effectively all of those drinks have very distinctive containers. And so they don't need to be filled with anything you could just put that emoji next to something else to imply what might be in it so like there's like lots of legacy decisions there that that can be unwound a little bit, but what I'm just talking about one like why do we have my day right like that's that's that's a very specific group of the world that understands what that is when the rest of the world doesn't and so how do you and create things that feel globally relevant, but also you know that are, you know. Yeah, anyway, so, and that's why that mountain is an interesting example someone can look at that and not know it's my day but have a use for it and that's that's the important part is that that makes it globally relevant like hand gestures hand gestures mean one thing I want part of the world that same hand gesture mean something different though yeah that ambiguities is a key feature of emoji. So the zone of exclusivity is what has not been made into an emoji rather than emojis that are now being left behind. That's more like you can do whatever you like right now. Whatever you want, anything you just play. The fun of working for home. There's an interesting proposal with the dinosaur emoji where there was a proposal for I think one dinosaur, and then there was a proposal for like two dinosaurs because you need a predator and a prey and there's a proposal for three dinosaurs. And then it went all the way up to like, what if we included like 32 dinosaurs to represent all of the major dinosaur, you know, species groups, and then it's like wait a second but do we need 32 dinosaurs. And at a certain point the dinosaurs start really looking like each other and, you know, but this is for every single category you know you could encode 32 dinosaurs you could encode 32 kinds of drinks, you can encode 32. Like anything. And like, but but at a certain point like the usability becomes a factor and the like, maybe this pleases dinosaur fans but people who are a fan of something else or like why they're only like three fish, shouldn't we be encoding like more fish, you can do it for everything. I have a thousand more questions but I'm going to open this up to our Q&A now. To start just very quickly somebody asked me to repeat the name of the sci fi novel I mentioned that was the unknown world by Liz Moore, highly recommended the glyph thing is only a small part of it about AI but it's very enjoyable. So, Wolfgang Bearman asks how do you determine frequency of use when speaking of adding a new emoji. We talked about this a little bit but is there maybe a little more detail you can go into there Jennifer. We talked to actually quite a bit about frequency of use. I'm not sure if the question was asked after we talked about it or before. It's again looking at how it's currently being used whether it be in digital spaces are not digital spaces and and being able to found that grounded have a benchmark to measure it again so you know it's not operating sort of vacuum. Cassidy moody asks what kind of self identification emoji do you commonly see that are not people's faces so plants animal sailboats and how do you see them used. That's like, you could spend, you could do PhDs on that. There's a paper that just came out last October about how studying specifically emoji and Twitter bios which I think is probably the best way to measure identity use cases versus messaging use cases. And honestly, none of the objects reach to the top 10. It was all colored hearts and soccer ball. I've seen people use the red rose for socialism and Twitter bios. I think the flowers are actually really interesting emoji use case so Unicode released a bunch of sort of compiled aggregate data from a combination of vendors that was all very sort of carefully back in I think it was towards the end of 2019 which feels like a million years ago, and I wrote a piece about that for wired about what the what this aggregate data can tell us in terms of which things are popular and sort of unsurprisingly your faces and your hands and your hearts are all very popular. Basically everything in that in that category even the unpopular faces are more popular than most of the objects. And one of the sort of surprising like sleeper hits in the that data set was that the flowers are really popular. And it's interesting because Unicode has encoded a lot more animals lately. And, you know, in recent years, but the flowers have kind of remained fossilized because like what we already have like eight kinds of flowers do we really need more flowers like what are flowers for. But what's interesting about how people use flowers at a communicative level is choosing between flowers flowers are often used sort of almost entirely for their decorative slash semiotic function. You know, flowers are themselves a symbol in many cases. It's not just like oh here's a flower and they're all interchangeable like they're in a vase on your on your table, but that this flower signifies this and this flower signifies this. And there's a lot of symbology around flowers in various different cultures for sort of how they're being used and what's going on with them. So I think there's potential for there are probably some flowers that have widespread symbolic use that might not be in the in the emoji set yet because it seemed like all flowers being treated as a unified category. But they're actually, you know, like, there's the red rose for love but there's also like, I don't know if there's a lily for, you know, peace or for for grief for these kinds of things like what other, what other types of symbolic meanings do flowers have because yeah flowers are are often really just symbols. Well they're emblematic right that's what you're actually talking about is like a rose means literally 15 different things like it is the US in Western culture but also an Eastern culture it's like very, very emblematic of so very much I like can't So first with other flowers which are more decorative. Yeah, we'll say on the, the next emoji release 14.0 Lotus flower. Great. Great. Great. Great deal of representation outside of literally representing Lotus. I know Cassidy actually has written emoji proposals for a number of different plants so thank you Cassidy I'm sure I know that the there was a house plant recently added like a plant in a pot, which I thought oh that's very useful because this isn't just sort of an abstract plant it's just like plant in the domesticated context which is kind of me. Another example of a container, you know, and what I really struggled I came in much later in that process but are we emoji, are we creating an emoji for a pot, or are we creating an emoji for a potted plant and then why are we making a distinction between which plant it is and how do you choose you the plant that isn't an emoji that has the highest frequency of representation in the world, you know, do you pick one that emblematic of the concept of a plant. That's just a little like seedling, you know, you're forced to make these arbitrary decisions that you should not be forced to, when people add these emojis so it really needs to be able to like stand on its own and that when you get to the design phase they're like, but what kind of Hindu temple, but what what what what hemisphere will this exist on like you really those those that should be reconciled in the proposed phase. Habib El Harani asks how different is it when Unicode asks a new emoji versus another script slash character with regards to the committee processing criteria but also more philosophically on debates about what concepts or symbol a Unicode code point should represent. And it ends with a thank you and a colon parentheses. The script discussions I only bear witness as an interloper four times a year as part of the UTC quarterly meeting so I'm not I couldn't sadly give you a satisfying answer there but a number of the folks who work on the scripting committees are on Twitter. And they're very, they are wonderful human beings and to give any questions around that I'm sure they'd be more than open to discussing or chatting on Twitter about it. I think one thing it's a little bit different so as an outsider you correct me if I'm wrong here. I think one thing it's a little bit different about the script discussions is that in many cases. What symbols are in and not in a script has already been previously established in some cases by centuries of convention. So, there isn't necessarily in the sort of handwritten and even you know type written typewriter sense or being used in a particular software program or something. There isn't necessarily as much, at least for the early stages when they were encoding very widely used scripts and this is potentially changed when they're encoding sort of more and more newer or emerging or ancient, or, you know, sort of less standardized scripts, but at least in the early stages like we know how many letters are in the Latin alphabet. We know how many accented characters are used in, you know, major European languages. So, like, how many letters are in the Cyrillic alphabet we know what what the letters are in the Greek alphabet you don't have to like go do focus groups to be like, but like, should the letter P be in there and how should we represent it. That's not an issue that you have with scripts in the same sort of way as you have with with emoji of like, you know, but what should the potted should like what should a potted plant look like and should it even be there is a more sort of existential one whereas for the scripts, there are often you can go look at newspapers that are currently being produced in this language and say what are they put in them. And so there's a much bigger corpus of data to draw on. And of course that can still be a complicated question because sometimes it's like, well this, this symbol is used differently in this area in this area, and should we let that be dealt with at the font level, where you can specify like this is the font that is the symbol differently, or should we have that being coded at the Unicode level where it's not a font and there's actually like two different symbols for how that's displayed. And that's, that's I think where the trickiness happens for the at the script level of like, should be should this be dealt with as a font or should this be dealt with as a, as a different script. But there are parts of it that are certainly easier than trying to figure out from the entire set of like things that could be pictures. We have four minutes left and several questions. So I'm going to try to get through some of these very very quickly, lightning round. Um, so Karen prello asks, do I understand that once accepted emoji or never retired, if so approximately 30 emoji are accepted per year at what point does the emoji collection become unusably large. And Karen notes side note I see there's a coronavirus emoji now would love to see that one retired. Which one. Yeah, there's no coronavirus, but I will say that there's already too many already too many. Because there's too many of them. It's just because the experience using them hasn't adapted. It's largely remain the same. When there are 700 emoji, and now we're at over way over 3000 emoji. There are ways to make that experience feel more intuitive and natural, things around proactive suggestions and prediction, things around the actual exploration of emoji themselves the browse experience the search experience so, you know, like, it's sort of one of those questions where one might say it's an opportunity, and others might say burn it kill it with fire, but you know I think the truth lies somewhere between you. I'll just leave it there, we're doing lightning round. Wilking bearman asks how international is the emoji subcommittee how much consideration does global meaning have and how does it get revised or evaluated which we've talked about a little bit but I'm curious about the makeup of the committee as well. We're surrounded by experts, I will say that it's a volunteer group that requires a great deal of work that's being done for free and asking people around the world to do work for free is very unreasonable, like you can't ask people to do that. What we're trying to do is meet up with people who maybe that time zone doesn't work and meet with them outside of the committee and consult and develop strategies around whether it be how facial expressions are done, or maybe it's about plants, or maybe it's about animals, or any number of cultural relevancy. So, I would say just like languages, like, you know, is for is by the people like we do the same thing and we surround ourselves quite a great deal of individuals. Gretchen, Angeline bio is asking if you could perhaps tweet the name of the study you mentioned before about emoji use. I think readers were our audience is very interested in that so. Which, which study was this with the with Swift key, she says. Oh, okay, yeah, so I did this, I can tweet that I can tweet the paper that I mentioned about emoji is gesture as well. So there's a few, a few things they're all I'll tweet some, some. That's that's the paper. I was like, who's that. Well, I think that is unfortunately just about all the time we have today but thank you both so much for joining us. Again, kind of want to make an emoji face to show how excited I am about this. I cannot wait to see what happens next with emoji. For the audience to upcoming events that you might be interested in on March 8 at 3pm will be speaking for about an hour on disruptive innovation and what it looks like today and where we can find disruptive innovation where we can expect it. And then on March 10 at noon Eastern author Ben McIntyre will be with us to talk about his new book, agent Sonia, which I highly recommend about spying and science. So Gretchen and Jennifer, thank you again for joining us and everyone thank you for tuning in today. Thank you. Thank you.