 Cool. Hi everyone, thank you so much for being here on this afternoon on a lovely sunny Sunday. I'm going to be talking to you today about why pizza means I love you. My name is Dr Sarah Wiseman and I'm a lecturer of computer science at Goldsmiths University. That's why you should listen to my opinions on emoji because I've got a doctor in front of my name. It's got nothing to do with emoji but don't worry about that. So I'm going to start this talk like all good talks should in that I'm going to quote from the dictionary. So I'm not sure if all of you know this but every year Oxford English Dictionary choose a word of the year. They choose it in order to represent what was happening in that year. What really in one word tells you what was happening in that year. They're all really depressing so get ready for these most recent ones. They gave us vape and selfie and the increasingly useful post truth and omni shambles. Now can anyone tell me what the word of the year was in 2015? Yes, someone can. Emoji. Are you saying it's the word emoji? Does anyone else want to have a go? Yes, what do you think it was? What? Or love? Very good, very good guessing. The word of the year in 2015, according to Oxford English Dictionaries, was laughing face with tears of joy. Oxford English Dictionaries were very proud to announce their first pictograph. It was very cute. Now why did they choose this emoji? Well they chose it because the word emoji and the amount of emojis that we were using in 2015 was astronomical. It had seen an amazing rise in popularity. And they worked with the company Swiftkey to work out what was the most popular emoji that was being used that year. And it was laughing face with tears of joy. I can tell you that since 2017 it has stopped being the most popular emoji. I will let you all decide what on earth could have happened in the year 2016 to make everyone in the world less happy. Anyway, now it's absolutely appropriate that there should be an emoji word of the year because emoji is so, so important to us. Even if you don't like it, lots of people out there are using it. There are 60 million emoji used every day on Facebook. And I can tell you that with thanks to my friends at Cambridge Analytica. Now 60 million is a massive amount and it's quite incredible, isn't it? I mean it's incredible how relatively small that massive amount is because on Facebook Messenger alone 5 billion emoji are used every single day. Emoji are here to stay and they matter to us. Did you know that you are twice as likely to open a marketing email if there's an emoji in the subject line? So the next time you do that be aware that you are being gamed very seriously. But they're here to stay. We use 2.3 trillion emoji in 2016 on various messaging apps across various platforms. They're really, really important. Now I probably don't need to tell you all of that. I'm sure most of you have used an emoji today in fact. So I want to tell you about why this is important to me in emoji form. And to do that I need to tell you a story. So I'm going to tell you a story about my friend. My friend wanted to buy herself a new house. As you will know houses cost a lot of money so she was saving for absolutely ages. She had done everything she could think of to save money. She had even moved in with her mum and dad. They will not thank me for representing them like that. So don't tell them I've used those emoji. And she'd even done the almost impossible thing of giving up avocado on toast. And so after all of that work and all of the effort that she put in. I was absolutely thrilled when last year I got a text from her. It's finally happened. We exchanged on the house. She'd finally found this dream house. She'd been working so hard towards. She'd been saving. Everything about her life. Finally this had happened to her. I was thrilled. I was overjoyed. I was ecstatic. And so I responded in the only way I knew how. Yes. Yes. Okay that response it turns out was the same response she had. I hadn't really thought when I'd sent their reply. Now that reply of carp streamers. It means something to me and it means something to one other person on this planet who also happens to be in this room. Me i'n my sister. There she is. Me i'n my sister have been sending carp streamers to each other for a lot of years and we cannot work out why we have been doing it. But it means I'm thrilled. I'm ecstatic. I'm overjoyed. This is the most fantastic thing that's ever happened. Why? So I was sending a really positive message and she didn't acknowledge it. Neither did you all. So I'm quite offended. But it made me realise actually there's this weird thing that me and Amy are doing. Amy is my sister. I'm going to call her Amy. I'm going to forget to call her sister. But there you are. You know who she is now. This is weird thing that we are doing. And I wanted to know more about this. I've always known that me and Amy are special. My mum always tells us this. But are we special enough that we're the only ones doing this? Are we the only ones out there that are using emoji for a different purpose just with one other person? So it gave me kind of two questions. One, do people repurpose emoji and use them for things they shouldn't? And two, are there people out there doing it with one other person to create a bond? So let's answer that first question, shall we? Are there people out there who are repurposing emoji? Yes. Obviously. Obviously there are people that are using emoji that aren't meant for their intended purpose. Now what do I mean by intended purpose? Well every year the Unicode consortium meet and they decide what new emoji we get. And they assign a name to each of those emoji. So for example, this emoji is called egg plant. Whereas most people in this room will know that it's an aubergine and we don't use the word egg plant. No, I don't mean that. But anyway, they give them these names and that means that there's often a disconnect. It means that we as users of these emoji, we never see those titles, we never see those names. We just see them in pictorial form, which often means that we give them our own meanings and we can assign them to something else. Now the Unicode consortium, they also get to decide on what new emoji we get. This year they've created one for describing your EMF tent in the night time. They've given us the chilly freezing face. But it means we get a lot of new emoji and we don't necessarily know what all the names are. Now, I have a question for you. I would like you to tell me, does anyone know what this Unicode character is? U1F351. Does anyone want to have a guess? I'll tell you, it has a lot to do with when in 2016 Apple ruined sexting. Does anyone else want to have a guess now? You all know it. It's the peach, it's the lovely peach. So in 2016 Apple users were furious. They were in uproar because Apple had ruined sexting for them. The way Apple had done that is that they had taken their peach emoji, which has always looked like this, and they wanted to give it an update. They wanted to freshen it up and they wanted to redraw it. And so for iOS 10.2, they were suggesting maybe we need to draw these emoji in a different way. So they gave us peach looking like this. People were furious. Why were people furious though? Well, Emojipedia have done a study looking into the ways that people use the peach emoji. And it turns out that it's not that often used to mean the fruit, surprisingly. It turns out that 4% of the time when people are using peach, they're meaning it in the sense of peachy keen and peachy cool and various things like that. 7% of the time when they're using this emoji, they mean the fruit. Okay, that's good. That's still a lot of percentage left though, isn't it? 73% of the time when the peach emoji features on Twitter in messages anywhere, it's referring to a bum. Why is that? Well, technically... Oh, it's because it looks like a bum. Sorry, I didn't have anything else. It looks like a bum. That's why. And so that's why people were really angry. Because this second incarnation, people didn't really think it did the job. It wasn't looking like a bum. And actually, people were so annoyed. People were so angry. People made such a fuss of it that, hooray, hurrah! The emoji was returned to its butt-like state. And this is wonderful. But it actually acknowledges the fact that tech companies, big tech companies like Apple are aware of and respect the fact that we as users of emoji add our own meanings onto them, that we aren't always going to listen to what they're called. Now, it's very likely that I haven't blown anyone's mind yet. You probably already knew about the peach emoji. And it's so well known that we are assigning these different uses to emoji that companies are actually cashing in on it. This is something that Jurex... I'm either going to surprise or disappoint or make you happy here to say that this never actually existed. This was just a marketing campaign. Is there any size? I'm sorry if that was upsetting for you. But that just goes to show it's such a universal thing that we do. We add new meanings to emoji. Lots of people do it now. But that only answers my first question. We've only seen instances of people repurposing emoji at a very universal level. Let's start getting smaller. Let's start thinking about people that use emoji when they want to hide or conceal a message. Are we worried about doing this? Are we worried about criminals doing it? Terrorists, dodgy politicians? No, we're obviously worried about teenagers doing it. And I'm about to show you a news clip from an American TV show that is reporting on this very, very grave matter. Am I? Kids are starting to use some as a secret code that we as parents can necessarily figure out. Often it's a combination of emojis, like a face with a zipper along with, should be parents next to that zipper. That would tell you, that would mean, don't tell your parents about something. Now another one is a fox. You think that's a simple enough thing, a fox, right? But that can be a message to someone that you want to sneak out. Sneak out of the house. A skull, arrow and a flame. That can be a saying to someone, I hope you die in a fire. Wow. Okay guys, don't feel bad if you don't know why that means that. This is really complex stuff, okay? Anyway, you can see how sensationalist and ridiculous it is, but this is something that people are really concerned about and interested in because the older generation often feel like they're having information concealed from them by using these type of emoji. Another thing that the older generation wrongly believe is that they can reach out to millennials and make them buy products and engage in things if they use emoji. So I'm just going to do a test with you. I just want to see if you're able to decipher what this emoji message means. My one clue to tell you is, don't read it like you've ever read any emoji in your life before. Does anyone have any guesses about what it could mean? Oh my gosh, the young person in the audience. Have a go. Okay, that's going to be surprisingly prophetic in a moment. I do want to do it again so everyone can hear what you think. I hope that you put away all the bad stuff and start working out and getting more healthy and getting a more sexy bum for the first one and then for the bottom one, stop smoking. Good, it's always a good message. Thank you very much for that go. That's not quite it. I wouldn't be surprised if no one managed to get this one. This is, I want and want to fit in, but I don't want to smoke. That's so hopelessly trendy. Anyone here who came in smoking is just going to give up now, I imagine, because that's pretty effective as a message, isn't it? This is an astonishing piece of marketing that a company tried to release in order to engage millennials and young people in their messages about giving up drugs, giving up smoking. They thought, aha, we'll do it with emoji. That's how we'll get through to them. Now, I'm not just making fun of this company. I mean all props for giving it a go. It's always nice to try and give a healthy message out to people, but I do want to show you just how badly these types of messages can be interpreted because emoji don't always have a single meaning. This came to my attention because of a linguist called Gretchen McCulloch. She was sent this book to review the semiotics of emoji, the rise of a visual language in the age of the internet. She has an absolutely incredible Twitter thread where she goes through this entire book and highlights a lot of very interesting parts of it. I will link to the Twitter thread at the end, but I just want to highlight this one that I brought up with you. You'll remember what this meant. It said, I want to fit in, but I don't want to smoke. The author of this book, an academic, so obviously they knew best, decided that it meant the following. I'm tired of drinking or doing things to fit in, like an ant. So I need to be strong and eat the right things and not take drugs. What on clue where that has come from? I want to fit in like an ant. This is absolutely astonishing. This is a published book and this is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the types of translations that this author offers for emoji. But my point being that sometimes we try to assign different meanings to emoji and sometimes we are worried that teenagers are doing it and sometimes we do not have a clue what we're saying. Anyway, so we've talked about the universal repurposing. We've talked about the case where everyone in the world knows what it means. Yeah, not everyone in the world. We've talked about this instance where teenagers might know what the secondary meanings mean. But you know what? We still haven't got to carp streamers. We still haven't narrowed the group down small enough and it's at that point that my research comes in because there was no one writing about this as far as I could tell. No one had talked about repurposing emoji with just one other person to create a bond. I decided to run a research experiment and I surveyed just over 70 people and asked them if they had an emoji that they reused and they gave a different meaning to when they were talking to just one other person and I got some really fantastic and interesting results and I'd really love to share them with you now. The most commonly repurposed emoji was the octopus. Lots of people reported using that for other meanings. Some of them lovely, some of them darker, a lot darker. That was one of the most common ones we found. The most commonly used pet name is penguin in emoji speak which is very adorable and if you do it you're not special. Loads of people are doing it. Come up with something better. So that was the most commonly used pet name. When people wanted to refer to a loved one in emoji speak they would use the penguin. Now, lots of people reported using emoji for excitement. These are results all of them from my survey apart from the top one because I asked my sister to fill in the survey and she did not fill in the survey. So I know that I have personal experience, anecdotal experience that people are using carp streamers to meet excitement. Other people reported using unicorns or this lovely game character to me and I'm excited, I'm happy. This obviously wouldn't be a talk about emoji without sex so other people reporting using emoji to talk sexily with their partner. Someone using the goat meaning horny and this bottom one someone reported trying to find the emoji that was the least sexy that they possibly could. Lucky them! So emoji used for sex. Moving on to other illicit things some people reported using emoji because they wanted to hide what they were doing. They wanted to specifically hide the intent of their message from prying eyes, maybe the law. So this person reported using this bugle for drugs because bugle blow a word for a certain drugs. So emoji can be used to hide your messages when you think that they might be grabbed in the middle and you don't want people to see them. Lots of people reported using emoji because there's this lovely shared history. For a lot of people an emoji can evoke a lot of things. For a lot of people an emoji can refer to a conversation that you had with someone. It can refer to a wonderful time you've had with someone. It can refer to a funny incident that you've had with someone. Rather than having to say to someone hey, do you remember that time which can feel clunky or uncomfortable at times? Emoji offer us a way to evoke something much, much larger than just the emoji itself. They act as a gateway to a shared history to encourage you to be able to talk about something with another friend. If you were thinking of another person and you wanted to talk about that special time you shared you can just send an emoji. It's just a bit more elegant than explicitly saying it in words. Other people reported using emoji because of the way that the emoji was drawn. This is very similar to what we do with Peach. Peach is repurposed to mean bum because it looks like that kind of. Two people reported using emoji in that similar way. This top one, someone wanted to use a coffin emoji but at the time they couldn't find one. They thought a person in a bath that sort of looks like a coffin. I think that's cool. This bottom one, thinking face. This was reported to be used by people to mean lesbian. The reason being that in American sign language that is lesbian in American sign language. It just so happens that the thinking face emoji can be used for that. There's no reason why it should look like that. Thinking face could be a statue with a thinking face. But it's not, it's that. There's no reason there's no link between thinking and the word lesbian but there is a link between the way it's been drawn. The way that emoji is drawn is really important. You might have realised this if you've ever texted your emoji cross-platform. Often the grimacing face can be misconstrued if you send it between an iOS device and an Android in one it looks quite happy and in one it looks quite unhappy. So it's really important to understand how emoji are drawn. Now, are the people using emoji to create windings? Does anyone understand that one? They're referring to their local pub, the Hatchet. I'm not going to say it out loud. It's funny, a lot of people are using emoji because it's just simply funnier to do that. Now, the British, we are not necessarily very good at saying what we mean and what we feel so again, emoji are a really useful way in a most emojis. Oh, my word. Help, I've gone too far. A way of sharing our in a most emotions and saying what we really mean without having to be too honest with ourselves. So lots of people are using emoji to mean I love you. Someone used a horse, I'm not sure why. They chose not to disclose that. But more than one person has a particular food type that they and their partner love. So that means I'm thinking about that food. I love that food and I love you. Which is why pizza emoji slice means I love you. As a result of this paper it's gone around my department. Now pizza emoji slice means anything to all of our colleagues. We just send pizza emojis willy nilly all over the place now. But it used to mean something special to someone. Now, this is my favourite one I would say. Sometimes people reported repurposing emoji just for an emotional connection. Sometimes it's really really hard to talk to someone. Sometimes it's really hard to tell someone how you really feel. And sometimes you need to just tell someone an idea, a thought, a concept and it doesn't really have words. Lots of people reported an emoji that they used just because talking is hard. Talking is hard sometimes and talking is really hard when we only have one medium to do it, when we only have the written word. And I think that's really the beauty of emoji. When we talk we don't just use our words, we use our tone we use gesture, we use touch and I think emoji give us that opportunity to add that texture to our digital written communication. They let us add another layer on top of what we're saying to another person. They let us tell them we're thinking about them that we let they let us tell them that that other person is important to you without having to say it. Because sometimes talking is hard when we let us get through that while still creating that connection to another person and while still allowing a bond. So that's the end of my talk. Thank you so much for listening. If you are into... Hang on, one second. I will say the paper if you want to read more about that paper can be found at that bit.ly link and if you want to read that incredible and I do use this word accurately incredible Twitter thread reviewing that book, it can be found at the bottom link there. And I think we do have time for questions. So if anyone has any questions, go for it. Thank you. Just to say, if anyone has any emoji that they use in this way, please please tweet me about them. I love hearing about them. First of all, thanks for the talk. I'm a bit crazy about emojis in Unicode. I had a little question regarding a thing you evoked during the talk but I think didn't tell too much into. It's like... The emoji, the way we see the emoji is not a part of the standard. It's part of the fonts that is selected by the manufacturer. Do you think that in the future there's going to be a problem with making the sense, the meaning of the emojis consistent across platform and across manufacturers and basically do you think that the emojis can become like another letter that the font doesn't matter for the interpretation? Yeah, I think that's a really good question and it's certainly one that I don't have a solution that I think would be appropriate. I think what this has highlighted is that it's important to whatever font you do choose for your emoji that it remains consistent that it doesn't suddenly change mid-use and it's difficult. I don't think that the solution is to say everyone's thinking face needs to look like this or everyone's heart needs to look like this because then I think we probably lose something. I think it's quite exciting that there are so many fonts and differences out there. I think one of the conclusions of our paper was not everyone needs to change so that we all use the same standard font across all platforms, although it might come to that. I think the conclusion was everyone needs to be very aware that the way that emoji are rendered and drawn needs to be incredibly considered and thought through and cannot on a whim be changed because although it may still represent the same thing to a lot of people out there it may become useless and it may no longer be able to be used for that secondary meaning. So I think that's a really good question and one I'm not sure where it's going to go but I'm intrigued to find out. Thank you. Did you have any examples in the paper of regional uses of emojis such for things like festivals that might only be attributed to a particular nation or a particular village and that people then talk to each other using emojis that represent that event? That's a really good question. I'm trying to think of them. I can't think of any regional ones off the top of my head but it's very frustrating. It feels like it's very close to the front of my brain that there is an example but I can't remember that. I know that there's a lovely paper showing you that people in different regions use emoji in different ways but in terms of your question I can't think of any regional examples but I can think of community examples. So there were a few people that used emoji that was specific to a particular community. Now forgive me if I may be about to misquote this and I haven't read it for a while but the red flag symbol or red I'm about to mess this up, sorry someone tweet me and tell me the actual answer. I believe that's representative of something within the autism community I think and so someone was using that to create bonds with other people in that same community so yes, I saw community ones I can't think of any geographical regional ones that I've found. This is a good question, thank you. Recently come across an effort to create a more open standard called mutant standard because I feel that unicode is almost moving too slowly and not being inclusive enough to cope with the evolution of the language and there's things like custom emojis in slack channels and things like that. How does that tension work do you think between the very specification oriented approach of unicode and the natural evolution of language? I don't know that's really interesting I'd love to talk to you about that afterwards actually if we may. I think probably the beauty of this is it shows that we can still evolve and take ownership of the pictographs and the characters that we are given that we are allowed to use in digital communication and I think this is good to show that we're still doing this because obviously with emoticons we began doing that we were given these punctuation points that we were told were to tell you when to pause in a sentence or when you were able to conjoin sentences or finish a thought no that's a smiley face and so I think it's quite nice that we are still able to fight against that constriction and I think probably constraining people leads to more creativity often so sorry I've just waffled here I would love to think about it it's a really interesting question I would love to talk to you more afterwards I think basically what I'm saying is yay we're creative it doesn't matter how you constrain us we will always represent what we want to say hi hi yeah I'm interested a little bit in your ways of obtaining data for these sorts of things so a lot of manufacturers will go to lots of effort to record keyboard information in order to give better spelling or better swiping usage or stuff like this is it possible to harvest data for these sorts of things or do you rely only on surveys so are you asking would we be able to skim emoji use data exactly no that's a really good question so that's not what I did this is very qualitative and it required people to reflect on those emoji but there are a load of really fantastic fantastic papers who have had access to data sets of millions of millions of millions of uses of emoji and I would recommend that you go to other experts who have done that type of research because it is fascinating to see when you do have a lot of data are you aware of any research into the use of emoji by people who use screen readers to blind people visually impaired where the image isn't going to come across and it's actually going to say peach yeah yeah yeah I mean I don't have any experience of using screen readers with emoji and I imagine it's a very unfulfilling use case I don't know how any research about that but that's a really fascinating question actually thank you for pointing that out to me I will have a think about that, thank you sorry I can't give you anything more useful do we one more question if anyone has one oh one more down here cool also I have a collection of emoji down here if anyone brought any to add to my collection they're making models okay sorry yes things I've noticed is different devices can sometimes render emojis slightly differently one being that the I think it's a grimacy smile on an apple phone oh no it's a smile on an apple phone can look like a grimace on an android and I've got majorly confused having a conversation is there any standardisation coming in not that I'm aware of and I think that's well it's similar to that question I think it might be a good thing that there's not standardisation I think it has excitement and intrigue to things but there are lots of lovely twitter stories of celebrities really badly misusing that face I believe to report on stories that they found were very tense and touching but on a lot of people's phones it looked like they were reporting on this very grim story with a great big smiley face next to it so it's quite amusing sometimes when they're misused okay oh sorry is that oh okay cool what's your opinion of the emoji movie I think it's very rare for research that I do to be of any interest or relevance to the blockbuster movie industry so I'm happy it exists and I'm also happy that I haven't seen it nor will I ever thank you thank you