Hi, everyone, welcome to the A6 and Z podcast. I'm Sonal. Today's episode is all about emoji, but it's also about bigger questions and how innovations come about, from the tension between open standards and proprietary systems to the economics of creativity. We began with a tour of different emoji and how they came about, the politics of emoji, where emoji fit in the taxonomy of visual communication,

and why this matters. And finally, we talk about the difficulties of translating emoji

when it's not really meant to be a language. Joining us for this conversation are Fred Benenson,

an early employee at Kickstarter who built their data team. He's also infamous for kickstarting a project

to translate Moby Dick entirely into

emoji. Also joining us is Jenny Lee, former New York Times reporter, who is a member of the Unicode

subcommittee on emoji, and who recently led the effort to get the dumpling emoji, which is where

we start the conversation. I wasn't a really big emoji user. In fact, the first time I ever heard

of emoji was when Fred started his Kickstarter called emoji Dick. And I was like, what the fuck are emoji? This is before they showed up on our iPhones, like, perky little yellow faces. I was like, what? It's like sounds something very bizarre. I just started. I don't even actually just be blunt. I had a very hard time using emoji because I didn't quite understand how to even, frankly, use that mom.

I don't understand it when people send it to me.

If it's not the obvious heart, you know, et cetera.

But as I've been using it more, I found myself sort of expressing myself now in kind of quirky ways.

And I don't know if people really get it or not, but I'm getting a kick out of it.

That's the fun of the ambiguity. I have a friend who showed me exchange between a friend of his who was dating a guy,

and he would only send her emoji.

And she was like, I just can't, I can't handle this.

And he showed me these screenshots of their exchange, and it was hilarious.

You're helping translate.

Yeah.

And so, like, I was like, oh, this is a birger act of like emoji. Yeah, I was like, I was like, this is what this means.

I can definitely see it being like sort of a irreconcilable difference between people

and relationships.

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