Which one won in 2021?
Wiki Article
The range of emojis available to us will only grow in the coming years. Are you already looking forward to the samba balls this fall?
This brings us back to the Unicode Consortium, the consortium that oversees "our" emojis. To understand how the consortium works, it's helpful to understand its structure. The Unicode Consortium is a foundation that, long before emojis were even invented, aimed to digitize our language. Importantly, the Unicode Consortium doesn't just make our emojis available by assigning them a Unicode. It also determines which emojis are added to the user set each year.
As mentioned, in principle, anyone can submit emojis through the procedure . A committee within the consortium ultimately determines which emojis will receive a Unicode. This committee includes Big Tech companies like Apple, Google, phone number list and Adobe. The latter, independently of the Unicode Consortium, determine whether an emoji ultimately appears in the user set. This also makes emojis political. For example, the Tibetan flag is Unicode-encoded, but not available to us.
An emoji everyone?
Emojis have become increasingly realistic over the years. Kurita's original series of yellow smileys has been expanded to include recognizable human figures, utensils, and animals. Various diversity movements have campaigned for greater diversity in the palette in recent years. While Kurita's basic set still consisted of universal yellow smiley figures, many groups felt unrepresented in the human emojis initially added by the consortium. Now, you can choose from various skin tones, women are no longer just involved in beauty treatments but are also represented professionally, and the January 2022 release added a pregnant man and a pregnant person. (Social media) campaigns are regularly organized to raise votes for a specific new emoji.
Incidentally, an application isn't simply a matter of filling out a form. For example, the official application for the polar bear at Unicode includes a well-substantiated argument about climate change, spanning over 14(!) pages. The polar bear is now a feature, but not every application is as successful. For example, vigorous campaigning was conducted to include the 'sad poo', but it didn't make the cut. The consortium's final conclusion was that it offered no added value.
Need to keep
The drive for diversity seems nothing less than self-evident. But what makes the selection process, as the consortium now seems to be setting it up, difficult is that it's an illusion that the emoji set will ever be completely complete. All the world's traditional dishes, clothing, sports… it's never going to be possible to add everything. It's also questionable whether that's desirable. Your keyboard would become an endless scroll, and who wants that? The point is, however, that the selection process isn't very transparent, and the representation remains unbalanced when you compare the diversity among users with who, and which objects, are represented in the palette.
Experts like Lilian Stolk agree: more transparency in the decision-making process would help foster greater understanding of the consortium's choices. For example, the menstruation emoji didn't make the cut, despite half the world being affected, but a drop of blood was ultimately added. Stolk approves of this, she said earlier in NRC:
The idea is: that drop can represent more than just menstruation. I'm in favor of that; we don't want to end up with tens of thousands of emojis on our keyboards. But then we have to make similar decisions in other situations as well. I think it's good if users are more involved in that process.
Nostalgic items
An additional problem: Unicode never removes emojis. Once in the set, the Unicode remains, and the emojis are therefore available forever. The reason for this is that the consortium sees archiving our language as its primary task. Any obsolete symbols belong there just as well. Practically speaking, this presents a challenge. Because how many emojis will we end up with? Moreover, you might wonder if it's still really necessary to have a floppy disk in emoji? Or a joystick? Nice nostalgic items, of course, but no teenager will recognize them anymore.
Dynamic language
Emojis will undoubtedly continue to fuel debate in the coming years. Is that a bad thing? I don't think so. Language, and therefore also visual language like emoji, is a dynamic phenomenon and will always continue to evolve under the influence of, among other things, the zeitgeist and technological developments. And development, a set that keeps pace with the times, is also what keeps emojis relevant. This also applies to business communication and marketing, for example, as you can read in this article .