Two Smiley Faces
The Documentary Podcast
BBC
4.3 • 2.7K Ratings
🗓️ 4 July 2021
⏱️ 24 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The emoji, invented in Japan in the 1990s, and now standardised on every device and platform we have, has become a new type of global communication. Whether you love them or hate them, they stir up surprisingly strong feelings and the fight for representation on the emoji keyboard can get very heated. In this first episode, we explore how for many of us, these cute symbols have become a natural part of our daily digital lives. We also meet two emoji lovers as they prepare to take on Silicon Valley and try to have their longed-for emoji approved.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Oh my emoji I do probably use more of the skeptical emoji than most people. |
| 0:10.0 | There's a crystal ball and I always like to put the sparkles. It's like putting very dust. |
| 0:16.0 | Ghost emoji with its tongue sticking out. |
| 0:18.0 | Thinking face or the eye roll. |
| 0:21.0 | If I want to emphasize my ethnicity, |
| 0:24.3 | then I tend to use more round skin tone. |
| 0:28.0 | I don't have a favorite emoji. |
| 0:32.0 | Oh, I don't, I really don't. |
| 0:34.0 | elephants you know worms dumplings. |
| 0:37.0 | Oh you the peach because I'm a hugger the hug emoji is the top one but I'm a real |
| 0:43.6 | face palm girl like really top two. |
| 0:47.6 | You're listening to the BBC World Service. |
| 0:55.0 | Okay, are you ready? I'm ready. |
| 0:58.0 | This is the story of something tiny. |
| 1:08.0 | Just a few millimeters tall, so small it can sometimes be hard to make them out at all. |
| 1:15.0 | But dismissing them as insignificant would be a mistake. |
| 1:20.0 | Because emoji It's something that should be taken very seriously. |
| 1:33.0 | I'm Sarah Trino and I'm Vivier Noonis. |
| 1:37.5 | And we started out with a simple question. |
| 1:40.8 | How did these emoji land on our phones? |
| 1:44.0 | We ended up issuing a version of Unicode that had emoji in it in around 2010. |
| 1:50.0 | And we kind of thought, well, maybe that would be the end of it. |
... |
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