Dec 29, 2017
Behind the scenes: choosing the new 💩💁😂
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There's 🍞, 🥐 and 🥖, but where's the bagel? AP Tech Writer Barbara Ortutay looks at the emoji approval process (complete with lobbying and campaigning).
How can our emotional vocabulary be complete without a teddy bear, a lobster, a petri dish or a tooth?
- "These are the kind of questions that trigger heated debates ... among members of the group burdened with deciding which new emojis make it onto our phones and computer screens each year."
- "The Unicode Consortium is tasked with setting the global standard for the icons. ... The nonprofit group [is] mostly made up of people from large tech companies like Apple, Google and Facebook."
- Why it matters: "Not since the printing press has something changed written language as much as emojis have, says Lauren Collister, a scholarly communications librarian at the University of Pittsburgh. 'Emoji is one way language is growing.'"
- Former N.Y. Times reporter Jennifer 8. Lee "didn't understand how there could be no dumpling. ... The process took almost two years, including research, many meetings and a written, illustrated proposal that reads a bit like an academic paper, complete with research on dumpling history and popularity."
- "But thanks largely to her efforts, the 🥟 was added to the Unicode Standard this year. "
