The tyranny of Emojis

🤬

Jul 26, 2024

I’m not a serious writer. Well, I’m serious enough to write every week but I mean I’m not … serious. 🤪 See how that emoji cleared up what was becoming a confusing intro?

Serious writers do not like emojis; I love them 😍

When you’re serious you don’t need visuals diluting the power of your pen and the written word. Can you imagine Ernest Hemingway sprinkling these 🦈 🎣 opportunistically throughout The Old Man and the Sea?

Ernest missed out on emojis by about 30 years. If he’d been a 70’s kid like me, no doubt he would’ve titled his masterpiece The 👴 & the 🌊.

The emoji saga continues to play out before our very eyes; yes we live in interesting times. We’ve seen progression from hieroglyphics to emoticons to emojis, and it’s not over yet.

Ok, I wasn’t around for Egyptian hieroglyphics but we know pictorial representations for communications have been around forever. Lots of written languages current and past including Chinese, Japanese, Mayan, and Sumerian use pictographic characters. For example, 山 or shān means Mountain and you can bet they are used throughout classic Chinese literature. See, Ernest would be in good company if he threw in a few emojis.
Emoticons like :-) started in the 80’s. When the Internet is blowing up, you need a smiley once in a while to inject tone into your bulletin board wisdom and emails. You can express a range of emotion with a few well placed characters - wink, surprise, stare, grimace and more: ;-) :-o :-| :-/. Big fan of :/. Hits harder then 🫤
ASCII art is an offshoot of emoticons putting together a more involved sequence of characters like this one of headphones: d[-_-]b These get quite involved and are beyond my geek skills; do not recommend.
Emojis came after Emoticons and were developed in Japan for an early texting system from Japanese telecom NTT. The word emoji is Japanese meaning ‘picture letter.” Similarity to the word Emoticon is a complete coincidence. It makes sense that Japan blazed the trail here as pictograms are long a part of Japanese writing as well, for example 川 or (kawa) is Kanji for River. Soon emojis were everywhere and Mark Zuckerberg got the 👍 to create the abomination that is Facebook.

Anarchy ruled early emoji-dom. Everyone created their own sets of emojis and they didn’t work across different systems. Sometimes an emoji would come out totally different on another system - not good when you type a winky ;-) that turns into a sad face :-(. If you’ve ever see a question mark type character like this � stuck in with some text, that’s when the system you’re reading on can’t translate from the original emoji.

All characters have a numerical reference in computers. Remember it’s all just zeros and ones. Early emoji numbering wasn’t consistent. Enter the Unicode standard - the Rosetta Stone for emojis. Unicode 1.0 came out in 1991, now we’re on Unicode 15.1 with a terrifying selection of nearly 4,000 emojis.

I’ve been on the front lines of several emoji anarchy skirmishes. One of my early projects was moving Bank of America from IBM’s chat platform to Microsoft’s. BofAs major chat use case surprised me - backchat!

You’re in a conference call with a bunch of people; group chats spawn like mad as soon as the call kicks off, rife with color commentary and direction to drive the call. The more important the call, the quicker your screen fills with furious chats. You can’t beat emojis for quick contextual communication:

Stop talking 🤐
You’re running out of time; AKA tick tock MFer ⏰
Can you even believe this crap 🙄
Oooh you so smart, I didn’t know you so smart 🤓
Wait, what? Nah 🤔

Bank of America’s users were so attached to their IBM emoji set we had to make cheat sheets for users struggling to translate IBM’s emoji’s to Microsoft’s.

Emojis form the backbone of corporate communications. Capitalism would crumble without emojis. Corporate emoji-dom runs amuck today in our post COVID Work-from-Home, Work-from-Starbucks, Zoom/Teams, whatever world.

I thought I’d done my emoji time but then in 2011 Microsoft bought Skype. Skype has the coolest set of animated consumer centric emoji’s. Take (stareyes) for instance:

Combining Skype’s emoji’s into Microsoft’s corporate emoji set became a big hairy mess that took us multiple client releases to get right, pissing off both Skype and Corporate customers along the way.

More emoji drama emerged in COVID times with Teams usage blowing up and lo our emoji picker didn’t support skin tones. You’d think making 👍🏼 versus 👍 would be an easy fix but you’d be wrong. You now need a skin tone picker to go with a specific subset of emojis.

Don’t get me started on the nuances of reactions or GIFs or Avatars. Ok one comment on reactions - you just have have more than a Love/Like ❤️ reaction. If someone’s dog dies, I want to support that but I neither Love nor Like it knowwhatimean? Substack, you hearing me? Also that ‘Ha Ha’ reaction in iOS texts - doesn’t that feel kinda disingenous? Like am I genuinely laughing or mocking you? Apple, be better.

While I’ve weaned myself away from emojis in my long-form weekly Tech Tales articles, I hafta let my emoji freak flag fly when writing a social post or a comment or a text. The difference is - just like corporate backchat - you’re commenting with context and often an emoji is just perfect. An emoji may not be worth a 1,000 words but the right emoji is easily worth 100.

Have you ever been texting and you hesitate on which emoji would be best? If you throw in 👍🏻 are you dating yourself much boomer? If you go 😈 is that too much? If you drop 🙏🏻 for a thank you are you gunna get an awkward church invite? Cross generational communications can be judgy on emojis. Substack is also judgy on this front - back to serious writers not using emojis.

What of the future? Well in my best writer foreshadowing I mentioned we’re surely not done with the emoji saga. Here’s one - Apple made up a new word - Genmoji’s supposedly coming in iOS 18. That’s where AI makes the emoji of your dreams up for you on the fly of say ‘T-rex on Surfboard.’ We’ll see, but one thing I can promise is the addition of new visuals in text based comms isn’t slowing down.

What of the movies? Sure, they made a movie where the characters were emojis living in the bustling city of Textopolis. Yep. The Emoji Movie. Apparently it was as awful as it looked with 6% on Rotten Tomatoes.