This podcast is all about emoji. But it’s really about how innovation really comes about — through the tension between standards vs. proprietary moves; the politics of time and place; and the economics of creativity, from making to funding … Beginning with a project on Kickstarter to crowd-translate Moby Dick entirely into emoji to getting dumplings into emoji form and ending with the Library of Congress and an “emoji-con”. So joining us for this conversation are former VP of Data at Kickstarter Fred Benenson (and the ???? behind ‘Emoji Dick’) and former New York Times reporter and current Unicode emoji subcommittee member Jennifer 8. Lee (one of the ???? behind the dumpling emoji).
So yes, this podcast is all about emoji. But it’s also about where emoji fits in the taxonomy of social communication — from emoticons to stickers — and why this matters, from making emotions machine-readable to being able to add “limbic” visual expression to our world of text. If emoji is a (very limited) language, what tradeoffs do we make for fewer degrees of freedom and greater ambiguity? How exactly does one then translate emoji (let alone translate something into emoji)? How do emoji work, both technically underneath the hood and in the (committee meeting) room where it happens? And finally, what happens as emoji becomes a means of personalized expression?
This a16z Podcast is all about emoji. We only wish it could be in emoji!
Show Notes
- How emoji originated, how they’re standardized, and more [0:48]
- The difference between emoji and emoticons [11:03]
- Social and political considerations around which emoji to include [15:30]
- Using stickers and images to express emotion [21:40], as well as Bitmoji [24:20]
- The story behind creating “Emoji Dick,” a translation of “Moby Dick” using emoji [29:11]
Transcript
Sonal: Hi, everyone. Welcome to the “a16z Podcast.” I’m Sonal. Today’s episode is all about emoji. But it’s also about bigger questions and how innovations come about, from the tension between open standards and proprietary systems, to the economics of creativity. We begin with a tour of different emoji and how they came about, the politics of emoji, where emoji fit in the taxonomy of visual communication, and why this matters. And finally, we talk about the difficulties of translating emoji when it’s not really meant to be a language. Joining us for this conversation are Fred Benenson, an early employee at Kickstarter who built their data team. He’s also infamous for kickstarting a project to translate “Moby Dick” entirely into emoji. Also joining us is Jenny Lee, former New York Times reporter, who is a member of the Unicode Subcommittee on emoji and who recently led the effort to get the dumpling emoji, which is where we start the conversation.
Emoji basics
Jenny: I wasn’t a really big emoji user. In fact, the first time I ever heard of emoji was when Fred started his Kickstarter called “Emoji Dick.” And I was like, “What the fuck are emoji?”
Sonal: What is “Emoji Dick?”
Jenny: This was before they showed up on our iPhone with, like, perky little yellow faces. I was like, what? It’s, like — sounds [like] something very bizarre.
Sonal: I just started. I didn’t even actually — just to be blunt, I had a very hard time using emoji, because I didn’t quite understand how to even, frankly, use them. I don’t understand when people send it to me, if it’s not the obvious heart, you know, etc. But as I’ve been using it more, I’ve found myself, sort of, expressing myself now in, kind of, quirky ways. And I don’t know if people really get it or not, but I’m getting a kick out of it.
Jenny: But that’s the fun of the ambiguity.
Fred: I have a friend who showed an exchange between a friend of his who was dating a guy, and he would only send her emoji. And she was like, “I just can’t — I can’t handle this.” And he showed me the screenshots of their exchange and it was hilarious.
Sonal: You’re helping translate.
Fred: But yeah, and so, like, I was like, “Oh this is…”
Sonal: You’re like the Cyrano de Bergerac of, like, emoji.
Fred: Yeah. I was like, “This is what this means.”
Jenny: I can definitely see it being, like, sort of an irreconcilable difference between people in relationships.
Fred: Significant other.
Jenny: Fast forward many, many years, emoji have shown up on our iPhone. And I’m texting with my friend, Yiying Lou, who’s best known as the designer of the Twitter “fail whale.” So, we’re texting back and forth about, like, dumplings. And so I sent her a picture of the dumplings I’m making. And then she texts me back knife and fork, knife and fork, yum, yum, yum, yum, yum. And she goes, “Wait, Apple doesn’t have a dumpling emoji.” I was like, “How could that be?” I was, like, because there’s so many obscure Japanese food emojis, since emoji are from Japan. Like, you have, you know, everything ranging from ramen to curry rice, to tempura, to, like, you know, the rice thingies on a stick to even — there’s even, like — triangle rice bottle, looks like it had a bikini wax.
Fred: There’s also the fish cake, which is the white one with the purple swirl.
Jenny: Yeah, yeah, the spiral. Totally, right?
Sonal: Oh my God.
Jenny: And I was, like, how could there not be dumplings, right? Because it’s such a universal food, right? Because there’s, like, pierogies in Poland, and momos, and gyoza, and empanadas. Like it’s just, like, a food from around the world.
Sonal: I mean, technically, samosa is a dumpling.
Jenny: Yeah, samosa, ravioli. And I was like, okay, emoji are universal, and then dumplings are universal. How could there not be a dumpling emoji? And just — in my mind, I was just, like, clearly, whatever system in place has failed.
Sonal: How do you solve a problem like the dumpling emoji?
Jenny: Yeah, and I found out that emoji are regulated by the Unicode Consortium, which is a nonprofit organization based in Mountain View, California. It now has 12 full voting members that pay $18,000 a year just to vote on issues, including, like, emoji and other kinds of, like, technical…
Sonal: Are those members in Mountain View or from around the world?
Jenny: So of those 12, 9 are U.S. multinational tech companies — Oracle, IBM, Google, Yahoo, Adobe, Facebook, Microsoft, and Symantec. Then of the other three full voting members, one is a German software company, SAP. Another is the Chinese telecom company Huawei. And the last is the government of Oman.
Sonal: That’s a really interesting crew.
Jenny: Isn’t it an interesting crew? And they have these quarterly meetings, and then I just show up. And they’re, you know, very welcoming. You know, they’re like, you know, “Thank you for coming. What brings you here? Tell us about yourself.” It felt like showing up at church — like a new church. You’re a new member. They all knew each other very well. They’re very excited that there’s, like, someone, you know, young and, like, diverse, who’s just, like, randomly showing up. And so I in that process learn how you get emoji passed, and how they’re regulated. And so, in January of 2016, we submitted a full proposal for dumplings, take-out box, chopsticks, and fortune cookies and got those all passed. So, those will be in Unicode 10, which means that — that’s announced in June of 2017. And so, they’ll actually hit your phones several months after that. I was like, wow, billions of keyboards will be impacted by this and…
Sonal: That’s amazing. Were there other proposals submitted at the time?
Fred: Oh, there are constantly proposals. There’s this whole process that people like Jenny — some of them make it through.
Jenny: It’s complicated, yeah. No, if…
Sonal: It’s a lot of work. It does introduce some good, useful bars actually for making sure quality gets through at some point.
Fred: Yeah. And to their credit, the Unicode Consortium has an amazing list of emoji criteria, where they say, “Okay, here’s what we’re looking for for emoji. It’s gotta have like, you know, kind of a unique meaning, in that it’s not covered by other stuff, but it also should have, like, you know, some ambiguity. So, it’s not just, like, literally one thing. It could be used in other contexts.”
Jenny: Also, there’s one of the more interesting rules, which is no celebrities, deities, or logos.
Fred: Whoa. The Easter Island head is kind of a violation of that one, but that’s got its own story. A couple of years ago, with a big update, the Easter Island head showed up in, like, the back of the travel section of emoji. And I was, like, what is that doing there? Who is traveling to Easter Island so often that they need to use the Easter Island emoji? And it kinda just stuck in my mind. And then I started using it in this, kind of, like, slightly culturally insensitive way to, like, reference some supernatural phenomenon that I didn’t understand, right? Like, if I was in a conversation with somebody and I was just, like, completely flummoxed, I’d just, like, send that one.
Sonal: Yeah, it’s like your version of Bermuda Triangle or something.
Fred: Yeah, yeah, I was just like, “Who knows? Stoneface.” Other people use it for, like, stoned, right? Like, there’s lots of combinations in there. The reason why it’s in there is that there’s a statue in downtown Tokyo. I think it’s a Shibuya station that is called Moai, which is a name of just, like — it’s a proper noun of that statue, which was made by an artist that was, like, a reference to [an] original Easter Island head. So, it turns out, Japanese teenagers use this waypoint to meet each other. And so, that’s how it ended up in Japanese cell phones, and that’s why it ended up in emoji. The artist used this inspiration of Easter Island. The interesting twist is that when you look at it on the iPhone, it doesn’t look anything like the statue in Tokyo. At some point, Apple was like, “We’re not gonna make it, like, this Tokyo one. We’re gonna do it [like] the original one.” Android, on the other hand, their Moai emoji looks like the Tokyo station one.
Sonal: So fascinating. I read a study — I actually included in our newsletter months ago of someone comparing how emojis look on different platforms and how it actually changes meaning, because…
Jenny: Totally.
Sonal: …you can actually think you’re sending one thing and you get something else.
Fred: That’s gonna happen in any system that has standardization. Like, you’re gonna try really hard to make sure people hue to the specification. But, you know, people do their own implementations and things change. In fact, the whole reason why emoji are in Unicode was because you would send your friend an emoji, and then their cell phone would actually just render the incorrect one. It could be so much worse. And the fact that there is a standard means that, like, you only get these, like, weird edge cases.
Jenny: There are still some interesting vestiges of, like, the different telcos between Apple and Google. One was Docomo and the other one was SOFTEL.
Fred: SOFTEL.
Jenny: SOFTEL. So, they’re basically — depending on who their partner was locally, they kind of inherited those generations of emojis. For example, on Apple, “women with bunny ears” is, like, two women dancing in kind of, like, a “let’s party” kind of way with their bunny ears. Whereas on Android, it’s just the headshot of a woman with bunny ears.
Fred: And it’s referencing this slightly misogynist part of Japanese culture of bunny woman, which is itself a reference to the Playboy bunny.
Jenny: Oh, right.
Fred: And so, they were cocktail waitresses working in nightclubs. That made its way into the Japanese set. And so when it came over to America, like, I think Apple must have been like, “Let’s make this a little more fun.”
Jenny: One of the easiest things actually to get emoji passed is showing that a vendor uses it. Another argument is for completion. This is actually why chopsticks got passed fairly easily, because we had, like, knife and fork, so you need…
Sonal: Oh, so you need completion of a set.
Jenny: …completion. So that…
Sonal: So, it’s actually you can tell a whole story, like, stringing together a bunch of…
Jenny: No, I just think that it’s, like, they’re engineers…
Sonal: Right. You can’t have ABCD and skip the D.
Jenny: Yeah, yeah. Actually, one of the weird issues is that there are red, yellow, green, purple, blue hearts…
Fred: Hearts. Yeah, yeah.
Jenny: …but not orange. So one of the big lobbying efforts has been to fill in the orange.
Sonal: So the case of the Apple bunny ears and the Japanese bunny women — that was a case where there was an intentional translation to, sort of, obscure the cultural reference.
Jenny: It’s more that…
Fred: There are just two separate ones, right.
Jenny: …they’re often — try to map technically the same emoji, but it’s, like, rendered and sort of interpreted differently. They like emoji that can have multiple meanings. You can also just have, like, emoji that have one meaning. But it really has to be a really good one if it’s gonna be one meaning. So for us, the Chinese take-out box, for example — one of the arguments that we made is that, one, it’s an iconic shape. It also symbolizes both an entire cuisine, which is Chinese food, and also a means of eating, which is delivery…
Fred: Takeout, right.
Jenny: …and takeout. Right. And so in that one symbol, you get a lot of, sort of, secondary meaning. And with fortune cookies, like, it’s technically a cookie, but it also means, like, mysterious, and the future, and the unknown, and like…
Sonal: So, like, sort of primary, secondary meaning. One of the criteria for an emoji to get passed is that it has to have a certain element of ambiguity to it.
Jenny: Well, I think, yeah…
Fred: I love this. I’ve been thinking about this so much. When I did “Emoji Dick,” it was more of an experiment around crowdsourcing an emoji itself. Like, I wasn’t, like, so much interested in making a formal case that emoji could be a language because it was still so early.
Jenny: Yeah, it was very early.
Fred: Could it get there maybe one day? Yeah. But Unicode makes a really good point. They’re like, “Emoji is not a language. It shouldn’t be a language. The value is that it’s ambiguous.” And I’ve really come around to that thinking, and this idea that the charm of sending an emoji is that it can be interpreted in a couple of different ways. And that’s actually why we value it. And I’ll go further and say that — a lot of people ask me why emoji have become so popular. And I think it’s tied to the fact that we now are just inundated with text. We live in a text culture, right? We communicate via text. Our careers are run over email. We read constantly. Everything we do is mediated through almost literal words. And so, emoji represents this kind of reaction to that. And the popularity of emoji, I think, is largely due to the fact that we need some other way of expressing ourselves over text.
Sonal: If the pipes are so mechanical, like, phones and machine, you no longer have the non-verbal aspects.
Fred: Absolutely.
Sonal: So, this is actually replacing sort of this human element of the glimmer in your eye or, like, the blush on your cheek.
Fred: Or even just…
Sonal: There’s an emoji that does that.
Fred: …you think about the amount of signal you get from somebody’s voice on an analog telephone. And when you strip that out and all you’re communicating is, like, LOL, you don’t actually know how sincere that laugh is, or that chuckle, or whatever that person’s trying to convey. And so emoji gives us a much bigger palette to convey this kind of, like, extra, like, limbic meaning that we wanna have in our communications, but we can’t because we’re texting all the time.
Sonal: So, to break down the taxonomy of figural representation not using literal text. Let’s talk about where emoji fits. We have emoticons, which are, like, a colon and a parenthesis, and that gives you a smiley face. Or, like, a semicolon and a parenthesis and that gives you a wink.
Jenny: Right. Using punctuation for existing…
Sonal: Using punctuation is an emoticon.
Jenny: Is often ASCII-ish.
Sonal: Right, because it’s got ASCII art as well.
Fred: And it goes way back. Some of the earliest references to emoticons go back to the 19th century as well, where people…
Jenny: Oh my God.
Fred: Yeah, yeah. People were using colons, and dashes, and parentheses to express, like, a wink. It goes way back. It’s important to add in hieroglyphs and iconography. Other humans have had this idea before. Like, the medium and the technology is kind of, like, incidental.
Sonal: I’m so glad you brought that up, because it’s so important to not get caught up in technology time. Well, technically, technology includes, like, sticks and stones, so that does go back in time. But in the context of this machine web that we live in, then we have emoticons as part of the taxonomy, and then we have emoji. But how would you guys define emoji?
Jenny: It’s Japanese. Drawing language.
Sonal: Emoji.
Jenny: I don’t know how to pronounce [it] in Japanese, but the Chinese — the “emo” is not for emoticon, or emotion or anything. It’s just totally a coincidence.
Sonal: Wow.
Fred: It’s hard not to just hue to the Unicode Standard and say it’s the set of icons defined in Unicode that represent objects, and nouns, and actions and…
Jenny: The way that I explain it to people is, an emoji is a character — an emoji is something you can put in the subject line of an email because it literally is text. So, in the same way that Unicode has, kind of, defined the standard to unify all the graphical representation of different langua