Summary
Born from a Japanese tech arms race and immortalized in Fred Benenson’s 2009 masterwork “Emoji Dick,” the emoji has become a staple of the way we communicate. Such that the Oxford dictionary named the cry-laugh emoji its word of the year in 2015. Whether you’d like to convey complex feelings such as “pweeeese” or embellish the end of a dry text message, it’s rare that these little symbols would not make at least one appearance in our daily text conversations. And, like most internet artifacts, early adopters of the emoji believed it had the potential to completely collapse the barriers of language and finally realize McLuhan’s predictions of a “global village.” But is that really so? In this finale episode Hannah and Maia discuss the history of the emoji and all its supposed utopian potential. Tangents include: the unasked-for details of Hannah and Maia’s long-awaited reunion, Canadian mennonite literature, and Hannah’s own personal version of the internet, the Web 1.5.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello? Hello. I can't start the episode like that. No. My aura will plummet. Okay. Hello. Hello. We are together for the first time in over a year and we're making it everyone's business. Like no one really gives a fuck except for those who have a parissocial relationship with us, which is probably a few of you. |
| 0:22.3 | It's your lucky day. |
| 0:23.4 | It's your lucky day because we're in person together at Hannah's family home in Toronto. |
| 0:28.1 | When I saw my year yesterday, I kind of had to look away and then look back and just like |
| 0:33.0 | take in the fact that it was her. Because it was quite surreal. |
| 0:38.0 | We didn't recognize each other. |
| 0:39.3 | And then Hannah waited outside a cafe for me to get there so that we could scream |
| 0:44.2 | as loudly as we wanted to. |
| 0:46.1 | Yeah. |
| 0:46.6 | Without disturbing others. |
| 0:48.8 | My year is five inches taller than me, but she like fell into my arms. |
| 0:52.7 | Like I felt like if only I could like lift her up right now. Yeah, in my, in my, my hope with that action was that you would lift me off the ground. But, you know, there's only someone you can do with a tiny girl. No, I just let you collapse into me. You're like, ah! But it was beautiful. It was beautiful. And the sunset came out. |
| 1:12.8 | And that was stunning. |
| 1:14.4 | And we were like, wow, this is magical. |
| 1:15.9 | Then we took a photo booth photo together. |
| 1:20.2 | Yeah, we got cocktails at one of our favorite bars. |
| 1:21.0 | Yeah, yeah. |
| 1:21.8 | It was, um. It cost $80 total. |
| 1:23.6 | Yeah. |
| 1:24.7 | Forget about that part. |
| 1:26.5 | Mm-hmm. |
| 1:27.4 | But no, absolutely crazy vibes. |
... |
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