This is the twelfth in a series of fifteen posts on Emoji (😂). Start at PART 1, continue to PART 13 or view ALL POSTS in the series.
We’ve come a long way, 👶, in this series of posts on emoji, and it’s time to round things up.
We’ve seen how emoji were invented, where they came from, and how they went global. We’ve examined the technical and political infrastructure that underpin the emoji we see on our smartphones and computer screens, and we’ve watched emoji transcend their electronic roots to appear in the news, in the courts, in the movies, and more.
We’ve dug into emoji’s problems with diversity, how the Unicode Consortium have tried to address them via annual updates, and the positive but incomplete steps taken as a result. We asked if emoji are a language, a script, or something else, and we’ve looked both at the proprietary “stickers” that threaten emoji and Unicode’s own attempts to break emoji out of their walled garden.
What, then, is the state of the emoji nation? In the final post in this series, we look at emoji’s journey so far and their prospects for the future.
✍📖 I’ve taken the rest of this post offline to be expanded and updated for my forthcoming book, Face with Tears of Joy: A Natural History of Emoji, to be published by W. W. Norton. If you need an emoji fix right now, why not read Emoji: the future of text? And if you’d like updates on the progress of Face with Tears of Joy, please subscribe to email updates below.