As I record this, the Unicode Consortium has just announced 250 new emoji. And there was much rejoicing. Um unfortunately they include things like "Man in Business Suit Levitating". And there's a reason for that and, *sigh* Well, it's a good question, which is "Why are emoji in there in the first place?" I've talked about Unicode before. It's meant to be this universal language. Well no, universal code, that includes every other language. It's meant to contain every single script every single character you could possibly put down that has any meaning. I mean it's got "Linear A" in it now which is an ancient language that no one understands but the characters from it
are in Unicode. And, well, so are emoji. But why? They're not something that you'd deliberately draw. They're not doodle-able in the middle of a sentence in scrolled written languages. But they're in here. And the reason goes back to the 1990's. And... Well it's an example of a standard that the rest of the world imposed on us English speakers. 1999, and we go to Japan. Now Japan at that point had well kind of like walled-off private mobile internets. It kind of had web access on the cell phone something close to it. But really it was like AOL used to be, if you remember that. They used to try and funnel everyone through their browser and their platform And the Japanese mobile phone companies made that happen. There was one called DoCoMo which had i-mode. I'm probably mispronouncing that but I'm an English speaker so that's what I do. um And the idea was, well, we've got enough bandwidth to send text. That's about all. We can't send pictures. But what we could do, 'cause we're not using ASCII, we're not using the the standard English speaking code that says "A" is one byte and "B" is another byte. We're sending Japanese characters. We're essentially sending pairs of bytes that say "Put this picture in." "Put this character in." So why don't we make some of those characters pictures? Why don't we add a smiley face? Why don't we add a few other things? And one engineer, Shigetaka Kurita, watch me looking at my notes to make sure I get that name right. Um Shigetaka Kurita came up with a list of a 176 characters. And they were characters, they were just 12 by 12 pixel grids. Really, really simple. And they were pretty much arbitrarily chosen by him and whoever he asked. They included a couple of company logos, for crying out loud. They included the sponsors of i-mode. And the idea was they would install those on the phones that they sent out to users. And so instead of having to send a picture they would just send a character code. Same as for any other Japanese character. And if you're using an i-mode phone you would send a smiley face and a smiley face would come out the other end. Which was great if you were both using i-mode phones. But then all the other network providers came up with their own lists of emoji, generally different. Not in all, but in most of the characters they chose different ones that has different interpretation. So if you sent one character from an i-mode phone to someone on another network then it wouldn't come through as intended. That's the first stage. Stage two. Along comes the Unicode Consortium. And they say, "Right. All these encoding of all your letters, we're just going to put them into one central thing." "We're gonna put them into Unicode. Everyone can agree on it." "You can send your documents internationally." Brilliant. Except all the Japanese people consulting on this said, "Great you're putting emoji in there as well, right?" And the Unicode Consortium had a very long and very pitched battle about this and eventually decided that yes, emoji would be going in. Because one of their their goals is that you should be able to translate two-ways. You should be able to translate documents into Unicode and out of it. So you need emoji in there or you're gonna lose data. So, in go the emoji. That's stage 2. Stage 3. Apple comes along. And we're a few years later now. Apple is launching the iPhone in Japan. And one of the first complaints they get back is,
"It doesn't have emoji." "We can't ... it's just coming through as junk." So Apple in iOS 2, way way back when, adds emoji. But you needed a Japanese SIM card in there, and no one really noticed. iOS 4, iOS 5 come along. They decide, "Well we might as well turn this on for everyone. Everyone's using Unicode now." "So let's just add a keyboard in there that says: emoji." It wasn't meant to go worldwide. It was never ever meant to become as big as it did. And yet, someone noticed, "Oh, I can I can have ..." -- why am i not holding my phone for this? -- someone went, "Oh, I can add an emoji keyboard, there's a setting in there." And then they sent a smiley face. I'm going to pretend it with a smiley face. Let's be honest, it was almost certainly the little pile of poo. They sent it to their friend. And their friend with an iPhone said, "That's amazing!" "This is brilliant! How do I turn that on?" And they did. And they sent it to their friend, and they sent it to their friend. Accidentally, Apple had created something wonderfully viral, just by turning on a hidden setting. So that when massive. And all of a sudden all the other phone companies are, Android, Microsoft are going, "Oh, we've gotta add this as well because people are texting these emojis to Android phones and and we're not understanding them!" So they added it. Um Web browsers now have to try and cope with it. Uh Firefox does very well. Firefox will look through the other fonts on your system for emoji and use them if it can. Chrome fails somewhat, there's all kinds of hacks being put in there. Everyone is trying to add emoji to their systems. Again, never intended to go this far. But here we are. And then, well people who don't understand where this came from -- which is, let's be honest, pretty much everyone -- are looking at the list of pictures and they're going, "Apple," -- 'cause they've assumed this is an Apple thing -- "Apple, why have you added bento box?" "But not say, taco?" "And what is a bento box?" It's a kind of lunch box. They've said, "Apple, why have you had this kind of weird five-pointed blossom with a circle in it and some
writing?" It's actually this stamp that a Japanese teacher would put on school child's work to say, well done. And they're saying, "Apple, why have you added a symbol for
'love hotel' ?" "And what is a 'love hotel' ?" And I'm not answering that on this video. More importantly they've said, "Apple," "why isn't they're anyone black in here?" Now that's that's a whole cultural context I'm really not qualified to comment on. But it is still a massive oversight. And Apple have the, well, fairly reasonable
defense that they're following the standard. Because it was never meant to be worldwide. This was settled on by one Japanese engineer and a couple of his friends. What? Nearly 20 years earlier? That engineer never meant this to go worldwide. Never really meant it to be used outside Japan. And yet, here we are. So Unicode 7 has just come out. And this is the excitement. And this is, "Oh we've got new emojis." "We've got new things to play with." So when it finally goes on to your phone you'll be able to scroll through the list. And you'll be able to say, "Oh, brilliant! They've added a a portable stereo boombox!" like it was the 1990's. And you'll be able to say, "Oh! They've added a 5 1/4 inch floppy disk!" like it's the 1980's. And they say, "Oh! They've added" -- I'm not kidding here -- "they've added a 'no piracy' symbol." And the 'no piracy' symbol, I am not joking here, is a man with a beard and an eye patch and a big Ghostbusters 'no' symbol through it. They've added Wingdings. They have added the entirety of Wingdings. You remember wingdings, right? It's It's the it's the font that was from Windows 3.1 that that had all the little symbols in it. It has... I'm not gonna try and draw this. You are going to have to superimpose this in post somewhere. They have added "Man in Business Suit Levitating". That's the formal title. It was meant to look like an exclamation mark and some kind of record company's logo, I don't know. But that's what's in Unicode. Those are your 250 new emojis. They are from Wingdings. Why? And I know the reason why. And the reason why actually does make a little bit of sense. The Unicode Consortium has looked at all the old documents out there that use Wingdings. They are looking at the emails that are still going round that have a "J" them for no good reason, because Wingdings mapped "smiley face" to "J". So if you put a Wingdings "smiley face" in there and it gets mangled along on the way it'll come out as a "J". And *sigh* and they're looking at this, and they're saying, "Right. We can convert these to Unicode. That's going to be our priority." Which makes an odd sort of sense. But it doesn't solve any of the cultural problems. I mean it just adds new ones. What you have here is the equivalent of those original emoji. You have some symbols that were decided on literally a quarter of a century ago by some engineers in Microsoft. *sigh* We haven't solved any problems. Not yet. I mean Unicode 8 hopefully will come along because there is now a massive bun fight going on about what symbols and what emoji get added to kind of equalize things in Unicode 8. And that's great. But it also worries me because what we have here is essentially a language. We have some letters that are decided on by a committee. And that makes me ... Actually that's probably not quite the right emoji. There's going to be one in here that sums it up ... ... somewhere in here ... (fading) I want ... (barely audible) Ok, not those ... We'd like to thank audible.com for sponsoring this Computerphile video. They've got loads of books online so head on over to audible.com/computerphile for the chance to check one out for free. Today I'd like to recommend "The Most Human Human" by Brian Christian It all surrounds this Turing Test, the idea of, can a computer pretend to be human? And if that is the case, then what makes humans human? Um Really really fascinating stuff, so check that out. Get over to audible.com/computerphile And thanks once again to them for sponsoring this Computerphile video [Tom Scott] You need something that's going to work more or less for ASCII, or at least not break things but still be understood. So what you do is you start by writing ...
