It’s hard to believe that an alphabet consisting entirely of pictures would ever be accepted into society, but the unthinkable has happened… in Ancient Egypt! Hieroglyphics are taking the pyramids by storm! Undoubtedly no one in the future will understand them, but for now they’re amazing at reminding everyone when Pharaoh’s birthday is. (Side note: Ancient Egyptians seemed to have cared about birthdays. As it says in Genesis 40:20: “And it came to pass the third day, which was Pharaoh’s birthday…” [Mechon Mamre translation])
That was the past (I’m sure they cared about birthdays just then!). Fast forward just a couple of years (well, maybe a few millennia more than a couple), and now we’ve got a newer pictorial alphabet that’s taken the world by storm: emoji. (The word is used for both the singular and the plural.) These tiny, numerous and expressive symbols have allowed people to add emotion, color and whimsy to their text messages and emails. For instance, a birthday can now be celebrated by pictures of cake and balloons! Emoji usually don’t supersede English when it comes to message writing, but rather act as a supplement, except in cases where a person wants to convey just emotion with some emoji faces. Or when you’re texting with your mom and decide to send her a whole farm of emoji animals—maybe that’s just me…
But are emoji all fun and games? Of course they can be used, just like any language, to express good and bad and everything in between. However, beyond anything that anyone says with them, I’ve begun to realize that there’s a startling dark side to emoji, which has come out of some recent developments in the “emoji world” I’ve heard about.
Some background: Far from being a random set of symbols, the emoji alphabet is a standardized “language,” set by an organization called the Unicode Consortium. The standard is showcased, as I understand it, using a set of descriptions of what the emoji should look like (e.g., “face with tears of joy”). Thanks to this standard, every device that uses emoji (and that is updated to the latest standard) will have a version of all the characters in the standard. The word “version” is important, and I’ll get to that soon. But at the very least, this means every emoji-enabled phone can display every emoji, no matter who wrote the phone’s software—an iPhone can send an Android phone a text and a version of the same emoji will come up.
There has been criticism of the consortium’s emoji standard—women are not fairly represented, for instance, and sometimes the selection of emoji is more limited than people would like (where’s the hot dog?). The organization has been updating the standard to add in more symbols, but on a broader note, it is a bit odd that one governing body essentially has control over what ideas make it into what’s becoming a language! However, given the compatibility issues between phones and the idea that all devices should be able to display all emoji, I understand why this is the case.
What bothers me more, however, is how while there is a standardized set of emoji, the standard doesn’t mandate what they should actually look like in practice, and the software makers are free to interpret the standard however they see fit.
An example of this appeared in the news recently, which is what got me thinking about all of this. Apple revealed, according to technology blog Engadget, that in the next version of its iOS software (which powers iPhones and iPads) the gun emoji will be changed from a realistic-looking pistol to a water gun. Is this a reaction to the recent spate of gun-related violence? It’s not clear, but it’s a major adjustment nevertheless. Oddly enough, Microsoft soon revealed that they’re doing the opposite, taking their gun emoji, which looks like a sci-fi ray gun, and changing it to look more like a realistic pistol. Engadget quoted the company as saying “Our intent with every glyph is to align with the global Unicode standard, and the previous design did not map to industry designs or our customers’ expectations of the emoji definition.”
As a side point, I disagree with Apple in this case. Changing the gun emoji to be less violent isn’t a move that seems as if it’ll help stem gun violence at all, and it doesn’t do anything for the victims. I saw it described online as potentially being “armchair activism” by Apple (similar to the “hashtag activism” I wrote about a few weeks ago). All it does is muddle the emoji vocabulary even more! What if an iPhone person sends a water gun emoji to a friend while talking about summer plans, and on the friend’s Android phone it comes up as a pistol?
I know the emoji symbol set is not, and never will be, a “bona fide language.” But it has become a new way that people communicate, and the standard tries to ensure that everyone using a smart device or computer can use it no matter what company made the software. The problem is that unlike regular English, the companies that make the software can each choose how to draw the emoji, and thus control or confuse how someone understands the symbol and uses it to communicate. In regular English, yes, someone can use different fonts to portray different emotions or aesthetics, but the words still stand on their own no matter how they’re typed. Emoji don’t work like that.
This doesn’t mean I’m going to stop using emoji, of course. They’re a lot of fun, and overall this issue doesn’t mean so much. But I don’t want to forget that while it seems like a fun, newer “language,” I may end up saying something with them that I did not mean to say…
Oren Oppenheim, 18, is an alumnus of Ramaz Upper School in Manhattan and lives in Fair Lawn, NJ. This coming fall he will be attending Yeshivat Orayta in Jerusalem; he will start college at the University of Chicago in 2017. Contact him at [email protected].
