Shady Characters

This is the eleventh in a series of thirteen posts on Emoji (😂). Start at PART 1, continue to PART 12 or view ALL POSTS in the series.

Given all we’ve seen so far in this series, it becomes natural to wonder: what’s next for emoji? And how do we even begin to answer that question?

We saw in part 7 that emoji are neither a language nor a script. But if we might be permitted for a moment to call them script-like, then, of all of the scripts and script-like things that we use to communicate online, emoji were perhaps the first to be native to the digital world. They were born to inject life into Japan’s teen-friendly poke beru, or pagers; later, they were adopted by Apple, Google, and other companies who have made their money online; and, under the care of the Unicode Consortium, they continue to be tended to by a group of nerds of the highest order. (As a software engineer by trade, I say that with the greatest respect.)

As such, it should come as no surprise that emoji have been, and continue to be, darlings of the tech industry. Emojli, the emoji-only social network, may have folded back in 2015,1 but that same year saw online payment company WorldPay muse that emoji might reasonably replace numbers when it came to PINs, reasoning that a combination of four distinct emoji makes for a significantly more secure password than four distinct digits.2* Also in 2015, Snapchat, an edgy messaging service popular with younger users, added emoji to indicate relationships beween users; a year later, Facebook, a distinctly non-edgy social network, augmented its internet-ancient “like” button (👍) with a palette of five additional “reaction” emoji (❤️, 😆, 😮, 😢 and 😠).4,5

Apple, as befits one of emoji’s earliest adopters in the West, have worked emoji especially hard. In 2017, the newly-launched iPhone X came with what Apple called “animoji” — animated, three-dimensional emoji with the ability to replicate the user’s facial expressions.6 It sounds odd, and, well, it was; within a day of the iPhone X’s unveiling, Devin Coldewey of TechCrunch opined that “Animoji are dumb and I detest them”.7 Dumb or not, Apple have since doubled down on the “weird animated emoji” front, last year launching a “memoji” feature that creates custom, emoji-style stickers based on the user’s facial appearance.8

✍📖 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.

Griffith, Erin. “Emojli Emoji Social Network to Shut down”. Fortune.

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2.

Worldpay. “The Future of Authentication: The Emoji”.

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3.

Kraus, Lydia, Robert Schmidt, Marcel Walch, Florian Schaub, and Sebastian Möller. “On the Use of Emojis in Mobile Authentication”. In ICT Systems Security and Privacy Protection, 502:265-280. IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology. Rome: Springer New York LLC, 2017. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58469-0_18.

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4.

Dewey, Caitlin. “Snapchat’s Controversial Emoji Update: An Explainer for the Old and Or Confused”. Washington Post.

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5.

Chowdry, Amit. “Facebook Emoji ’Reactions’: Are There Ulterior Motives?”. Forbes.

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6.

Apple Newsroom. “The Future Is Here: IPhone X”.

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7.

Coldewey, Devin. “Animoji Are Dumb and I Detest Them”. TechCrunch.

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8.

Apple Newsroom. “Apple Previews IOS 12”.

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*

A study conducted in 2017 showed that in certain circumstances, emoji were indeed a practical alternative to PINs.3 ↢