Bring On the New Emoji!

Unicode is pushing 38 new emoji for inclusion into its image library. Not all of them will appeal to everyone, but some of them look pretty important: "shrug," "rolling on the floor laughing," "motor scooter" and "clinking glasses" are going to get pretty high usage, I'd imagine.

I'm probably more of a curmudgeon than the next guy, but I love emoji. Far from being newfangled geekery, they obey some very old priorities of the Internet. Emoji are brilliant because they have high infromation density, but they are low bandwidth, asynchronous, and interoperable.

It cracks me up how these priorities are the same as when I first got online in the 1980s. People want to communicate; that's what the Net is for. They want to communicate as much as they can, with maximum reliability, with the minimum number of keystrokes, to anyone else on the Net.

That's why emoji are so much better than, say, stickers or picture messaging, and often better than simple text. Emoji add tone and context to ASCII text, which famously has always lacked tone. That's why we've had emoticons for decades—to add tone. Emoji make it much easier to type and access what were once some pretty arcane and difficult-to-decipher emoticons. (I remember typing half of those on Usenet in the 1990s.) They're a popularization as much as an innovation, building on decades of Internet communication.

Unicode's participation is vital. I'm deeply concerned about the fragmentation of the Net into silos of incompatible proprietary messaging systems. Facebook's Pusheen and Line's stickers—basically, proprietary emoji—are just another form of lock-in, trying to get you to speak a language that's owned and operated by one for-profit company. Ew.

Picture messaging takes time and effort. It can be very high information density—it's worth 1,000 words after all—but it isn't quick, and it strains low-bandwidth networks. Plain text lacks some of the additional connotations and informational haloing we've attached to emoji and emoticons. The shruggie is much more evocative than just "shrug." The "100" emoji, with its dynamic form and evocations of both a teacher's red pen on an exam and corporate faux-enthusiasm, holds more shadows and reflections than just "100."

Interoperability is also just plain key for something to go truly viral. Emoji, Unicode reminds us, come in part from the emoticon systems that MSN and Yahoo Messenger used. But just like with SMS text messaging, they only took off once they were standardized and universalized. As we watch mobile payments fail yet again in the U.S., it's good to remember the importance of standards.

Making Emoji Even Better
It's important to understand that emoji are not some sort of corruption or destruction of language. They are an addition to language. This is not Idiocracy, and for that matter, to say emoji lead to Idiocracy is to say that people aren't using them as multivalent ideograms or enhancements to ASCII text, which they are in fact doing.

Recommended by Our Editors

QUIZ: Do You Speak Emoji?

Now that emoji are out in the wild, I'd really like to see as many removed as are added. With too many emoji, there's a discovery problem; you have to scroll too much to find the one you want. More categories could help, but for instance, I have trouble seeing how a lot of the "symbol" emoji are usable in the West, and that's a large category, accounting for 164 emoji. They could remain in the Unicode standard but not be surfaced on U.S. keyboards. Unicode's report on Emoji usage frequency is really helpful here.

The addition of the new croissant emoji (and previously, the addition of multiple skin colors on human emoji) also show that Unicode is making the emoji set more culturally global, which is great. Emoji started out in Japan, so a lot of the food, especially, is Japanese. Unicode is being a good steward by managing its emoji stable. And if that means English is becoming partially an ideogrammatic language, well, I don't have a problem with that.

Note: PCMag's content management system does not permit me to type emoji, in case you were wondering.