We live in times of persistent scarcity. All the components and supplies that until recently were supposed to be used to build the future are running out, regardless of whether they are about microchipselectricity or professionals acts.
Some time ago further delivery problems became known in a rather improbable field. These are emojis. Just 31 of the symbols that populate text messages around the world will be added to the library this September. Compared to last year (112 new symbols) or even 2020 (more than 300), one can already speak of a downturn.
What is the shortage? Have we already found a suitable symbol for all everyday items? Since 2010, the number of pictograms has increased from a few dozen to more than 3,500. By the way, among the newly added emojis are the symbols for a jellyfish, a ginger root, a dustpan or a flute. What not only appears very arbitrary at first glance, actually follows a complicated and lengthy selection process, which can also become highly political. The proposal to make a cannabis leaf an emoji, for example, has already been rejected six times in a row.
The Oxford Dictionary chose the tearful face as its “Word of the Year”
The so-called Unicode Consortium decides which symbol will ultimately find its way into smartphone keyboards. The non-profit organization is made up of representatives from almost all major computer and software manufacturers and ensures that characters are displayed consistently on all operating systems. Among other things, the emojis. The criteria for a new symbol are not that easy to meet. It has to be a stable concept, not too specific or already expressable with the combination of other characters.
The website emojitracker.com can even track emoji usage on the short message platform Twitter in real time. The list of the world’s most popular symbols is led by a wide margin by a smiley face with tears laughing. It has been sent more than 3.5 billion times since counting began. The venerable Oxford Dictionary even voted the symbol “Word of the Year” a few years ago.
At this point at the latest, it was all over for conservative language guardians and other self-proclaimed keepers of the good old days. You don’t want to know what they have to say about other emojis that have since been added: such as depicting same-sex families, a pregnant man or a non-binary Santa.
It is not yet possible to know where the discursive boundaries of these symbols lie
An under-complex criticism often fails to recognize what we are actually dealing with: with a constantly evolving crypto language, the significance of which differs greatly depending on the conversation situation. Depending on who you are having a text conversation with, completely different meanings are possible. In some milieus, the combination of aubergine, peach and a crooked grin is not interpreted in a culinary sense, but as a suggestive message.
This dynamic can also be seen very nicely on Twitter. There, the hostile social fronts have temporarily switched to reviling each other in emoji form. Some send the clown face, whereupon the other side – once again – responds with the teary-smiling face. No one takes the other seriously, everything is ridiculous – so much dislike communicated through two yellow circles alone.
Where the discursive boundaries of these symbols actually lie has therefore not yet been definitively answered. Does the emoji carry the emotion or the other way around? Or are the symbols completely meaningless in one way or another due to their inflationary use? In any case, philosophers of language and semioticians still have a lot of fun with the pictograms – more than they have had in five millennia of written language.