Love in the Time of Emoji

Sidedoor

Smithsonian Institution

African American History And Culture, Tony Cohn, Natural History, Air And Space, Society & Culture, Art19, Smithsonian, Science, Sidedoor, History Of The World, The Smithsonian, Pop Culture, Zoo, Dc, National Museum, Exhibit, History, National Zoo, American History, Exhibits, Postal Museum, Washington, Museum

4.6 • 2.3K Ratings

🗓️ 1 December 2021

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When LOL just isn't enough to respond to a friend's killer joke, emoji are there for you. But for many people, there isn't an emoji to represent them or the things they want to say. This has pushed activists, designers, and straight up regular folks to create their own emoji. It's not as easy an undertaking as you might think, but every now and then one of these new emoji is so innovative it breaks the digital mold and finds itself in the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. In this episode of Sidedoor, we explore how one groundbreaking emoji is changing digital representation and the future of museum collections.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey everyone, I don't know if you've heard the news, but this month, a slate of 15 new emoji
0:06.4	go up for final approval, meaning you may be seeing some notable and highly useful additions to
0:12.2	your keyboard, like a shaking my head face. So you can say, oh no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
0:18.0	without all the nose. Also, a menagerie of new animals, including a few that might help with
0:23.2	inventive name calling, like a donkey, a goose, a moose, and one of my all-time favorite animals to
0:29.9	be afraid of, a jellyfish. They're so freaky and cool. So with these exciting new emoji on
0:36.7	horizon, we thought what better way to build anticipation than with one of our favorite episodes
0:42.0	from the side door archive. Love in the time of emoji. In it, we learned about the origins of
0:47.4	emoji, what goes into designing a new emoji, who approves them, and why these little word pictures
0:53.2	really do matter. So enjoy, and we'll be back in two weeks with a brand new story for you.
1:08.5	This is Side Door, a podcast from the Smithsonian with support from PRX. I'm Lizzie Peabody.
1:17.5	One night, Jennifer Aitley was texting her friend. She was hungry. And we were taxing
1:29.5	mouth dumplings because we are Chinese-ish women, and that is what we do. We text about food.
1:34.5	So Jenny ups the ante. She sends her friend a picture of some tasty-looking dumplings.
1:40.1	And then she like, text back, yum yum yum yum, knife and fork, knife and fork, knife and fork,
1:43.8	and then nurses pause. And she goes, oh, Apple doesn't have a dumpling emoji. And I was like,
1:48.9	oh, that's kind of strange. This was 2015. Jenny didn't really use emoji, but still she was baffled.
1:55.7	I was like, how is there no dumpling emoji, right? Because their dumplings are universal. These
2:01.0	things called emoji were like universal. And like, if there wasn't a dumpling emoji, then whatever
2:07.7	system in place has failed. So, fueled by dumpling-induced indignation, Jenny set out to correct
2:14.4	this travesty. After doing a little research, she discovered there was a cryptic council of tech
2:20.0	elders called the Unicode Consortium. It's like a city council that meets to vote on new emoji
	...

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