The Endgame of Emojis: Analysing Emoji Policy

Abstract

Digital communication is as ubiquitous as ever, and emojis have become an integral part of how we communicate. The organisation behind the emojis on your screen is the Unicode Consortium, which is a non-profit organisation harbouring members such as Apple, Google, and Microsoft that currently pay 50.000$ yearly for their memberships with voting rights. The Unicode Consortium curates an encoding font, the Unicode Standard, which is currently used on over 98% of all websites, and when the Unicode Consortium in 2010 included the first set of emojis in the standard, it marked the beginning of emojis as we know them. In this paper, emojis are argued to have powerful implications from a poststructuralist perspective. This is first done through a literature review, where emojis as a ‘language’ and the Unicode Consortium’s effect on emojis in terms of diversity, racial and capitalist issues are explored. Secondly, the notion of emojis as a ‘language’ is discussed against Ferdinand de Saussure’s notion of the linguistic sign, and it is asserted that emojis in their current form are not a language. Here, the paper turns to Foucault’s notion of power relations that are discussed in the context of the Unicode Consortium’s governance of emoji users. Emojis are then argued to be expressions of policy on behalf of the Unicode Consortium, and the paper proposes the term selecting of emojis to encompass the full range of the Consortium’s emoji policy. The paper then explores how The Unicode Consortium represents its selecting of emojis through both the historical inclusion of flag emojis as a case of cultural diversity in the years 2010-2023, the selection criteria for emoji selection, and the strategy documents concerning the future of Unicode emojis. This is done through a framework of What’s The Problem Represented to Be by Bacchi & Goodwin (2016), where it is the represented problematisations in the selecting of emojis by the Unicode Consortium that are the focus of the analysis. The paper finds that in the Unicode Consortium’s representation of its selecting of emojis, the primary ‘problem’ is that of adding more emojis, shown throughout the representations of emoji selecting in both the original proposal of emojis in 2009 and in strategy documents and blog posts of the early 2020s. The subproblems of this ‘problem’ are represented to be (1) users potentially not using emojis, (2) the costs of including more emojis, and (3) political criticism for both the inclusion and exclusion of specific emojis. The Unicode Consortium is here found to represent its selecting of emojis as ‘unproblematic’ regarding potential political criticism by employing a narrative of technological neutrality (Miltner, 2020; Sweeney & Whaley, 2019), a lack of disclosure of reasonings behind concrete emoji selection, and the Consortium’s ‘solution’ to have ambiguous emojis be ‘building blocks’ for users to ‘build’ their own meanings in place of adding more emojis. Specifically, the Unicode Consortium’s emoji policy is found to mostly favour those countries represented with flag emojis in its original set of emojis in 2010. These were the United States of America, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Russia, China, South Korea, and Japan. The represented intention of the original emoji proposal was not to include any more emojis than those 719 emojis, which were specifically ascribed to having been used by Japanese cell phone users. The available emojis today are therefore found to have been affected by the bias inherent in the original set of emojis due in part to the Unicode Consortium’s emphasis on usage. The original representation of those ten countries is therefore reflected upon here as being a representation of the Unicode Consortium’s intended userbase for emojis. Additionally, the Unicode Consortium’s emphasis on and conflation of emoji usage with the cost of adding emojis is shown in the analysis to reflect the economic ‘burden’ of its corporate members regarding the implementation of additional emojis in the user interface of their operating systems. The effective goal of TUC’s governance in the instance of emojis is therefore reflected upon as an expression of capitalist notions such as profit, despite the organisation’s designated ‘non-profit’ status. Finally, the Unicode Consortium’s ‘solution’ of emojis as ‘building blocks’ is discussed in relation to its applicability by users, and the role of TUC as an organisation with a ‘monopoly’ on emojis is discussed regarding advantages of standardisation against disadvantages of capitalistic profit-orientation.

A master thesis from Aalborg University

The Endgame of Emojis: Analysing Emoji Policy