“Children of tomorrow will have no understanding of the English language,” Federighi said jokingly.
So who is Federighi and why did he say that? Let’s find out...
At last week’s Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple’s annual showcase of new tech, the company announced a special texting feature coming soon to iPhones near you.
“You know, sometimes you’ve typed a whole message and you realise at the end that you’re entirely lacking in emojification,” said Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice-president for software engineering. “So we provided the solution: When you tap on the emoji button, we’ll highlight all the emojifiable words there, and you can just tap, tap, tap, tap and emojify.”
On a screen behind Federighi, a simulated message underwent the process: The word “basketball” transformed into a little black and orange cartoon image of the ball itself. “Pizza” flipped into a glistening pepperoni slice. “Movie” turned into an old-school film camera. A collective “Ooh” wafted up from the technorati gathered in the crowd.
“Children of tomorrow will have no understanding of the English language,” Federighi said jokingly.
In a rush to harness the power of the web’s most evocative cultural units — emoji and their hyperactive cousins, GIFs — tech companies, corporate brands and entrepreneurial social media stars could risk inadvertently flattening the creative world that’s sprung up around them.
“There is a constant push and pull between people finding new ways to express themselves online, and companies trying to make money off that expression,” said Luke Stark, who studies digital communication and psychology.
New emojis on the way?
Emoji have emerged as cultural forces in and of themselves. The Unicode Consortium, the body that standardises emoji, will release 72 new ones that will soon make their way to our fingertips.
What happens when companies become interested in emojis?
When emojis and GIFs are filtered through the interests of tech companies, they often become automated. In addition to Apple’s “emojification” feature, there is Twitter’s new GIF keyboard (a partnership with the GIF company Giphy, which has been pumped with $78.95 million worth of funding since 2013). It directs Twitter users to choose from a suite of emotional reactions, including “Agree”, “Applause”, “Aww” and “Eww”, which conjures a set of appropriate GIFs.
Is it a good or a bad thing?
Buying into these features means giving tech companies the power to shape our creative expressions in ways that further enrich the companies themselves. A limited emotional range helps collect data on users’ states of mind. Twitter advertisers can now target users based on the emoji they tweet.
How are new emojis selected?
Meanwhile, as traditional emoji expand beyond their Japanese roots, tech companies such as Apple, Microsoft and Google (all are voting members of Unicode) have become responsible for making cultural, and sometimes political, choices in determining which new emoji will make the cut.
Some additions to the emoji repertoire are informed by experts: Unicode has consulted the Cornell Lab of Ornithology for bird emoji advice. Others are culled from “popular requests from online communities” and proposals submitted by the public.
Companies have also made bids to influence the result, although Unicode says it rejects emojis “strongly associated with a particular brand.”
“One of the things that make emoji fun is this quirky weird list that came about through accidents of history,” said Jeremy Burge, the founder of Emojipedia and a member of Unicode’s emoji subcommittee.— New York Times News Service/ Photos: Handout via NYT
There is a constant push and pull between people finding new ways to express themselves online, and companies trying to make money off that expression.
