Jane: This is But Why: A Podcast for Curious Kids, from Vermont
Public. I'm Jane Lindholm. On this show, we take questions
from curious kids just like you and we find answers. We love
your questions because often one simple question can inspire us
to explore so many different topics: science, history, art
and culture...all wrapped into one question. Today's is kind of
like that.
Leila: My name is Leila. I'm from Melbourne, New Jersey. I'm
nine years old. And my question is: how were emojis invented?
Jane: Before we can answer how emoji were invented, we need to
make sure we all know what they are. If you've ever watched a
parent or an older sibling or a caregiver sending a message to
someone else on their phone--or maybe you've even grab their
phone yourself--you might have noticed that, in addition to
typing words, you can type in pictures to get your message
across. You might add a heart symbol or a smiley face to end a
message with a kind of note of affection, kind of like, "I love
you" or "I like you." Or you could use the face of someone
laughing instead of typing out, "That's so funny," when somebody
sends you a joke. Maybe you want to know what's for dinner. Well,
instead of writing, "What's for dinner tonight?" you could punch
in a picture of sushi, a chicken, drumstick and a bowl of
salad, followed by a question mark. There are lots of pictures
to choose from. And all of those symbols are called emoji, small
images, symbols or icons used in electronic communication.
Paul Galloway: The emoji developed over a long period.
But in particular, in Japan and the 1990s the word is actually a
Japanese word. It's a two-part word. So "eh" means picture, and
"moji" means character. So emoji means "picture character." My
name is Paul Galloway. I'm a collection specialist at the
architecture and design department in the Museum of
Modern Art. And that's a very long way of saying I take care
of art and design at the museum.
Jane: The museum Paul works for is sometimes called MoMA,
because that's what the initial spell: Museum of Modern Art.
It's in New York City. As part of his job, Paul is actually
working on a book about emoji. And by the way, you say emoji,
whether you're talking about a single picture, or lots of them.
Kind of like how one moose is called a moose and many of those
animals altogether are still called...moose. Let's get to
Lelia's question about how emoji were invented back in the 1990s.
Paul Galloway: They were developed in people trying to
make cell phones and pagers. Before there were cell phones,
if you wanted to catch your friend or your parents, and they
were away from a home phone that had a cord connecting it to the
line, you would call a pager and leave a little callback number.
And then that person would then go find a public payphone and
call back at that number. And the youth in Japan, the young
people, didn't like doing it this way. So they immediately
started using pagers in a way that nobody anticipated. They
would use little number codes to mean things to each other like
01069 meant "I love you." Or 049 meant "Thank you." And they use
these kinds of codes. And then along came one of the Japanese
companies that was selling these pagers and said, "You know what
people might really like is a heart. And then they can send a
symbol instead of just numbers and letters." So this company
was called NTT DOCOMO, which is very much like a big Verizon
Wireless or AT&T, it's a huge company. And their pager with a
heart on it was extremely popular. And a few years later,
they released a cell phone that also had the emoji capability,
but this time with 176. So you could say that emoji were made
in Japan and made for Japanese pagers and cell phones. But they
even go a little further back from that. Some of you, some of
your listeners might know that kind of emoticons, the smiley
faces you can make with a colon and a parenthesis. In Japan they
have more keys and characters on their keyboard. So there's even
more complicated faces that they can make including the shrugee.
We've all seen the kind of funny shrugee face.
Jane: Right. You make it out of lines and it looks like somebody
with their hands raised like they're going "I don't know."
Paul Galloway: Yeah. it's it's it's a wonderful kind of...I use
it all the time. People ask me where do emoji come from and I
respond with a shrug.
Jane: Which technically is not an emoji, right? Emoji are
actual pictures, and emoticons are the ones that are made with
the letters and numbers and that are more sort of symbols that
represent a picture.
Paul Galloway: Right, and they're sideways. That's another
key thing. Emoticons, in the West, you have sideways faces,
happy faces, angry faces, and kaomoji, which is the Japanese
equivalent. They're horizontal, but they're not characters we
have on our keyboard, you can't type out the shrug emoji. We
don't have the right characters on your keyboard here in the
west. So that's only something that can be done in Japan. So
there's emoticons, there's kaomoji, and then emoji become
the kind of actual faces that you see on cell phones. And they
were used on cell phones in Japan for quite a long time. But
they were really stuck in Japan for a while because if you were
on a DOCOMO phone, you couldn't send an emoji to somebody on a
different company's phone. So each company had their own kind
of locked thing. So it didn't work all that well. And it
wasn't until 2006, when Google added emoji to Gmail, and then
in 2010, when Apple added emoji to the iPhone that suddenly the
world took notice and started using them. And now emoji are
used in crazy numbers. I think, on Facebook messenger apps
alone, there's 5 billion emoji sent every day, every single
day.
Jane: The emoji that you are talking about that were built in
the 90s, they looked pretty different than what we see on
cell phones today. What did they look like?
Paul Galloway: Well they look, for kids today, they might be
like something they would see in Minecraft, everything's very
blocky and pixelated. And that's because computers back then were
very, very weak. They were not very good computers. And in
particular, cell phones were very, very primitive. They did
not have very strong computers. Their screens were tiny, and
only had one color and it was very, very simple graphics. So
the emoji from the 90s in Japan are extremely simple and blocky.
Jane: Emoji today are much more detailed. They look like full
little pictures. But how do they get on people's phones? Who
chooses which pictures get included and how?
Jane Solomon: My name is Jane Solomon. I am a emoji expert.
And I'm also a dictionary editor.
Jane: Jane is an editor for emojipedia, an online
encyclopedia for all things emoji.
Jane Solomon: If you go to emojipedia and you want to look
up, okay, what are different meanings for this kind of hand
gesture or this flower, whatever, you might be able to
find some information there. You might be able to find what
flower specifically it is. And you'd also be able to find how
it looks across different platforms.
Jane: By different platforms, she means things like different
phones made by different companies. So a picture of a
cactus might look different on a phone made by Apple than on an
Android phone. Here's something that might be tough to wrap your
head around. When you send an emoji, what is actually being
sent from one phone to another isn't the picture itself. It's a
code. The code gets sent from your phone to your friend's
phone. So okay, I'm going to send Melody a picture of a
cactus. First I find the picture I want. And then I hit send. And
now Melody's phone is going to read, or interpret, the code
from my phone. And what she'll see on her screen is a picture
of a cactus. She sent me back a bison and a sloth, so I'm going
to send her a heart. Now, something simple, like a heart,
is pretty easy to make from one phone to the next. But as the
emoji pictures got more complicated, as more and more of
them have been created, and they looked different, like I mean,
you can get a bowl of spaghetti with sauce, or you could send a
picture of a person getting a haircut. Well, not all the
phones and devices were making the pictures from those codes in
exactly the same way on every kind of phone.
Jane Solomon: Well, for example, there were emoji that were of
different facial expressions. And they could have completely
different meanings or--based on who was sending it and what
device they had, and who was receiving it and what device
they had. For example, one of them is the grimacing face,
which is basically a yellow face emoji with two eyes, and then a
mouth that's kind of in an oval shape, with teeth showing. And
in the past, it appeared differently on different phones,
it was a completely different expression.
Jane: If you think you're sending your friend one kind of
face, but your friend is actually seeing something
totally different, that doesn't make communication go very
smoothly. So a group that deals with computer language got
involved to create some emoji rules.
Jane Solomon: Unicode is this organization and their goal is
not related to emoji, specifically. It's related to
communication and getting all the languages that people use,
all the written languages, able to be sent from one device to
another across platforms, any language you want to do. And
these big tech companies don't necessarily prioritize making
communication accessible in those languages. So Unicode
makes these code points for these different characters that
might not have existed if there weren't an organization looking
out for that. Now, emoji got added on to this mission, around
2008, 2009, 2010. They started working on making emoji
accessible in this way. Because before you could only really use
them if you had specific phones and were in Japan, basically. So
emoji got pulled into that because they were viewed as this
important mode of communication.
Jane: And so now when you send an emoji to a friend, you can be
pretty sure your friend is going to see the same picture on their
phone that you have on yours. But Unicode, the organization in
charge of this, also has a lot of control over which new emoji
get added. And Jane is part of the group that makes those
decisions. Coming up are emoji art? And how can you get a new
emoji added?
Jane: This is But Why a podcast for curious kids. I'm Jane
Lindholm. Today we're learning about emoji, those little
pictures you can send in text messages and emails. at MoMA,
the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, you can see the
original emoji created in Japan in the 1990s. They're projected
up on a huge white wall so they're bigger than your head.
There's like a weird little umbrella, a boxy little car.
There's a sun, which looks like a circle with little lines
around it. I mean, remember, these were the olden days of
emojis, so they look blocky and pixelated, not like the pictures
of today. But still you can tell what they are. They're
definitely real pictures of things. So if you send that boxy
umbrella, the other person is probably going to know it's an
umbrella. But what are these boxy images doing in one of the
most impressive art museums in the whole world? Are emoji art.
We asked Paul Galloway. He's the guy who says he takes care of
art and design at MoMA,
Paul Galloway: Emoji, we felt, were a really important moment
in communication design, and how we could tell the story of where
we are right now. We love taking design objects that everybody
uses everyday: chairs, cars, trains that you're on and
environments that you're in, and helping people see them in a new
way. And most people are completely unfamiliar with where
emoji come from, how they started, the fact that emoji is
a Japanese word. I can't tell you how many people think it has
emotion as part of the word. And it's like, no, no, no, it's
completely got nothing about emotion in the word, it's a
Japanese word. So we love that idea of sharing with people the
genesis of the story, and then helping them to kind of think
about why we use emoji and why that becomes so important to us.
An important thing to remember is that art is a form of
communication. It's a way of taking an idea from me, the
artist, and giving it to you, the viewer. And that's done
visually. And we can communicate ideas visually, we can
communicate ideas verbally, by speaking them out loud. We can
communicate ideas by sending messages to each other. And so
art and language are, have been linked forever. In fact, art is
much older than the written word. And an art museum, as our
job, is to tell the world about visual culture. So we feel it
very important to help educate our public of the importance of
the art that is in their lives every day. We like to think of
architecture and design as the art that goes home with you,
right? You go to MoMA and you see Van Gogh, and you see
Picasso, and you go home and you do live with the art that's on
your iPhone, or on the video game that you're playing. And
you are part of that artistic story.
Jane: One of the things I've been thinking about is how
people use emoji today, often, instead of using words. But what
if your idea of what a face with star eyes means is different
from what I think it means? If I send that picture to you, and I
mean one thing and you think I mean something else, how are we
really effectively communicating? Are pictures
going to give enough information for someone to know what you're
trying to tell them? Paul says there are lots of ways we get
our meaning across that don't just involve words, and there's
lots of ways to be confused by things, even when we use the
same words.
Paul Galloway: We talk about tone and intention, and written
speech, but it's very much a part of spoken speech as well.
If I'm talking to you, and I am your boss, and I say, good job,
there's a million ways that can be heard, I can say, "good job,"
or "good job" or "good job," right? All of them are the exact
same words, but they're delivered with completely
different meanings. And we call it we can call that gesture, we
can call that intonation. But there's also my face, what kind
of expression was on my face when I was saying "good job"?
All of those are the kind of important context and further
clarification of the word "good job." And emoji can do that as
well, right? You can say "good job" and a thumbs up emoji. That
can be read as actually affirming you did a good job, or
it can be read as sarcastic. But that same danger can be had in
person, right? We are always at risk of miscommunicating. And in
a way, I think emoji, by allowing more interpretation on
the message, actually makes the speech much more human. Because
if we're just typing "good job," like a robot, we're just left
wondering like, what could they mean? I have no idea, am I
actually talking to a person or is this a an artificial
intelligence chatbot on the other end? Whereas when you
start using emoji, you're bringing the human into the
conversation, you're bringing the chance of misinterpretation,
or a richer understanding of what somebody is intending. It
allows for a little bit more chaos, which conversation is
chaotic.
Jane: Jane Solomon agrees.
Jane Solomon: There's no right or wrong way to use an emoji.
You want to make sure that the person that you're sending emoji
to understands what you're saying. And it's very hard to
express that sometimes with just emoji. But if we use words
alongside emoji, our points can get across. Or if we have an
established connection with someone and they have the same
understanding of an emoji as we do, we can send them back and
forth. And it can be very meaningful. But you know, use
them however you want. They're really just this form of
expression that's out there and available to play with.
Jane: While emoji have come a long way from those pixelated
images of 30 years ago, Jane says she actually kind of like
those better.
Unknown: At this point, like in modern times, emoji have a lot
more detail. They have shadows, they have really subtle
expressions and differences in the line quality. So yeah, they
look a lot different now. I actually prefer the less
detailed emoji designs because when something is less detailed
it could represent more things. When something is more detailed,
it shuts off some of these interpretations or it makes it a
little bit more of a stretch to to think about it in a different
way.
Jane: Okay, so what if you want to create a new emoji and get it
in everybody's phone, or at least want to suggest one that
you think should be there?
Unknown: Anyone from the public can submit an emoji proposal at
this point. And then a group of people called the Unicode emoji
subcommittee (and I'm actually part of that group) reads the
proposal, and discusses the merits of the proposal and then
recommends or doesn't recommend it to become encoded into the
emoji set so it can be used by people all over the world,
across devices.
Jane: As we are making this episode, there are 3664 emoji.
That sounds like a lot to choose from. But Jane says the
committee has approved a lot fewer emoji in recent years than
they did in the past. Either way, it's definitely grown
beyond the handful of original emoji created for pagers in
Japan back in the 1990s. Now, in terms of favorite emojis, what's
your favorite? Jane says one of hers is actually a relatively
new one.
Unknown: The melting face emoji, so it's a smiley face, and it's
and the bottom of the smiley face looks as if it's melting.
And I think that's a really good and fun emoji because it it can
express a lot of feelings at once. It can express that maybe
you're trying to look happy, but things are kind of falling
apart, which I'm sure everyone can relate to. And it can also
express sarcasm. So it's it's just a really funny emoji to
send to people. I like that one.
Jane: Thanks so much to Jane Solomon with emojipedia and to
Paul Galloway at the Museum of Modern Art for teaching us all
about emoji. What kind of emoji would you propose if you were
going to create a new one? Draw a picture of the emoji you think
should be there and have your adult send us a photo of it. We
want to see what you would create. That's it for this
episode. If you have a question about anything, have an adult
record you asking it. It's easy to do on a smartphone using a
voice recording app. Don't forget to include your first
name, where you live and how old you are. Then your adult can
email the file to questions@ButWhykids.org. We
can't answer every question but we listen to them all and we
love hearing what's on your mind. But Why is produced by
Melody Bodette and me, Jane Lindholm, at Vermont Public and
we're distributed by PRX. Our theme music is by Luke Reynolds.
We'll be back in two weeks with an all new episode. Until then,
stay curious!