Shady Characters

This is the sixth in a series of thirteen posts on Emoji (😂). Start at PART 1, continue to PART 7 or view ALL POSTS in the series.

The emoji season of 2019 is upon us. Every year or so for the past half-decade, successive batches of new emoji have issued forth from the hallowed conference rooms of the Unicode Consortium. This year, the emoji gods sent down their new creations — focused on improving representation of people with disabilities — on the 5^th of February.1

This yearly tradition is much younger than emoji itself. Emoji has always had an ambiguous relationship with culture, ethnicity and gender — which was forgivable, perhaps, in 1999, when emoji were monochromatic 12 × 12 icons unable to communicate anything much more nuanced than “this is a person’s face”. Fifteen years later, when they had morphed into full-colour, professionally-drawn icons promoted by a bevy of global tech giants, emoji’s ongoing gender bias and cultural insensitivity was starting to look less naïve than it was wilfully ignorant.

✍📖 I’ve taken the rest of this post offline to be expanded and updated for my forthcoming book, Face with Tears of Joy: A Natural History of Emoji, to be published by W. W. Norton. If you need an emoji fix right now, why not read Emoji: the future of text? And if you’d like updates on the progress of Face with Tears of Joy, please subscribe to email updates below.

1.

Burge, Jeremy. “230 New Emojis in Final List for 2019”. Emojipedia (blog).

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