Atomic Unit The Delicate Art Of Emoji

BACK IN 1999, when the mobile internet first flickered to life on Japan’s i-mode, email was confined to a snug 250 characters. Email! So when designer Shigetaka Kurita centered pixels on his potter’s wheel and spun them into sunshine and rain , he was both supplying a jolt of atmospherics to the early smog-screened smartphone and frugally conserving space.

Kurita’s horizontal rain and naval-ensign sun were among the first 176 emoji. These symbols, of course, put meat on the bones of emoticons, the digital typographical form born in the 1970s on Plato, a computer-based teaching system. Plato emoticons had to be styled by hand, with meticulous backspacing, like screen-based needlepoint. But they were also much more sophisticated than later ASCII and could be quite beautiful when encountered in the bleak midwinter of Arpanet-era networks.

- Virginia Heffernan

There are now more than 2,700 emoji, and new ones get introduced every year. But which emoji appear on the major keypads: That is left to the whims of the Sanhedrin of emoji—the Unicode Consortium.

Twelve dues-paying members with full voting rights make up the consortium: one each from Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, Adobe, Apple, Google, Facebook, Shopify, Netflix, the German software company SAP, the Chinese telecom company Huawei, and the government of Oman (... ). UC Berkeley, as well as the governments of India and Bangladesh, have lower-level memberships.

The consortium’s chief task is to set the Unicode Standard that gives order to the way text is encoded and represented in the world’s writing systems. But when it comes to emoji, Unicode needs political and cultural finesse. Since 2015, the consortium has had to choose the hues available for the complexions of smileys. It has had to OK and reject religious symbols. And one day it may have to decide whether to endorse an emoji family with two gender-fluid parents, or, as is allowed in Oman, a family with one husband and four wives.

In the past year, for example, Unicode faced a sensitive matter: whether to include a menstruation emoji. The glyph, which showed blood-stained underwear, was proposed by an international girls' organization to promote frankness around the delicate subject of uterine linings.

It gets tricky.