CUPERTINO, CA – OCTOBER 27: Emoticons are displayed on the Touch Bar on a new Apple MacBook Pro laptop during a product launch event on October 27, 2016 in Cupertino, California. Apple Inc. unveiled the latest iterations of its MacBook Pro line of laptops and TV app. (Photo by Stephen Lam/Getty Images)
“Problematic,” is how a team of biologists from the University of Milan described the apparently pitiful number of animal and plant emojis currently available for use. The number of animal icons has in fact doubled since 2015. But it is still not ambitious enough, according to this bunch of conservationists.
It may sound extreme but these researchers were deeply peeved by the discrepancy between species representation. For example, there are multiple emojis of bears but just one bald eagle emoji.
Vertebrates, they point out, are overrepresented whilst arthropods are underrepresented. Annelids were not represented at all until 2020 when users were treated to the addition of a generic worm. Yet there are still no emojis to represent round or flatworms.
The biologists believe a more varied selection of plants and animals could improve discourse around biodiversity and conservation. But how could new shrooms come into being?
Our emoji overlords: the ‘unsexy’ emoji subcommittee of the Unicode Consortium
Change was (and is) affected through a mythical organisation known as the Unicode Consortium. This little-known California-based non-profit comprises an elusive emoji subcommittee which is responsible for deciding and releasing new emojis that will then update on phone users’ emoji keyboards. Their aim is to make emoji and text legible and accessible for everyone regardless of phone model or location.
Anyone can join Unicode if you’re up for paying 50 grand a year. Full voting members are Adobe, Airbnb, Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft and Netflix. Currently there are just the two supporting voting members: Bangladesh Computer Council and Tamil Nadu’s Tamil Virtual Academy.
The emoji-specific subcommittee, which is volunteer-run, is chaired by an employee of Google, Jennifer Daniel, and vice-chaired by a representative of Apple. “It’s not sexy,” she told MIT Technology Review in 2021. “There’s a lot of paperwork. A lot of meetings. We meet twice a week.”
The subcommittee does not propose new emojis itself but rather takes suggestions. Anyone can suggest one, but you have to make an argument for it (the form is pretty damn complicated, which may explain why the emoji overlords only receive around 100 proposals a year).
One politically-minded City A.M. reader proposed a “cut the red tape” emoji. But alas… Yet there is a way.
Daniel is keen to emphasise that it’s not just Big Tech and big spenders dictating our emoji keyboard. “It’s important for people to understand that we’re not inventing language, that it’s really the people who craft it and are inventive,” she said. Daniel meets with gesture linguists, botanical gardens, cardiovascular surgeons and whale experts in order to get each new emoji just right. It can take two years for an emoji to be developed.
How did we get here?
In the beginning, there was the word. Or… was there the emoji? Perhaps it was an ensemble of emojis of a proffering hand and the earth, or maybe it was the spark-and-bang emoji. There is no God emoji, unless you have a looser interpretation of god than man-or-woman-in-sky-sporting-white-toga. But if there was, one thing’s for sure: people would fight about it.
Ever since their development from the humble emoticon – allegedly invented in the 80s by an American professor overseeing a web chatboard who proposed the
Why conservationists are calling for more mushroom emojis
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15.12.2023
CUPERTINO, CA – OCTOBER 27: Emoticons are displayed on the Touch Bar on a new Apple MacBook Pro laptop during a product launch event on October 27, 2016 in Cupertino, California. Apple Inc. unveiled the latest iterations of its MacBook Pro line of laptops and TV app. (Photo by Stephen Lam/Getty Images) “Problematic,” is how a team of biologists from the University of Milan described the apparently pitiful number of animal and plant emojis currently available for use. The number of animal icons has in fact doubled since 2015. But it is still not ambitious enough, according to this bunch of conservationists.
It may sound extreme but these researchers were deeply peeved by the discrepancy between species representation. For example, there are multiple emojis of bears but just one bald eagle emoji.
Vertebrates, they point out, are overrepresented whilst arthropods are underrepresented. Annelids were not represented at all........
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