The Very Online Show 02: The Emoji Illuminati

This is real fascinating stuff.

By the way, J-Phone eventually became Soft Bank, not the other way around.

This show is so great. Definitely gonna try to come up with some ideas for episodes.

It's incredible to me that there aren't emoji for vinyl records and cassette tapes.

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From California here. Have heard that word used many times over the years. Never once heard anyone, regardless of location, use "shion" at the end. It's always been a hard T. Language is weird.

I just saw that Lucy has a "Welcome Thrillho" sign and she became even cooler.

Emoji are permanent unless they don’t want them to be, I suppose. I remember the gun emoji used to be a gun, and it showed up in the video a few times, and it got changed to a squirt gun. So I guess you could say it was only edited and not removed, but come on. They removed the firearm emoji and added a water toy emoji.

Probably for the best! But still worth a squinty side-eye whenever They have rules They say They follow (until they’re not convenient.)

Big improvement over last time, love it

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This was a stellar episode, felt way more natural than the first one!

Loved that it's basically Giant Bomb's There's No Such Thing As A Fish.

Old man moment: The internet was better when we used emoticons to enhance words instead of using emojis (which are basically just hieroglyphics) to express entire concepts. We're basically just reverting back to hieroglyphics.

This was really informative

I'm only partway thru the ep so I don't know if it's mentioned but I'd highly recommend reading Because, Internet by Gretchen McCullough, a great book about the evolution of language on the internet - including emojis. ❤️

@janman: Much appreciated. It’s good work and does fit. Just a couple cases of multiple in a row.

My husband just said "They declined Biryani?! Madarchod!!"

Lucy drove a great episode with more stellar chemistry between the trio. I laughed! I learned! As others have said, the production is really fun, too.

If you drew a threatening doodle at work or school, red flags would get raised. The difference with emojis is they quickly take on multiple meanings, even if they weren't designed that way, so people are using them to say-not-say things they'd be afraid to put into words.Like punctuation, they help people hedge their bets & soften their blows. That's how I use them.

It's easy to imagine it would make a (legal) difference if an emoji gun faced left or right alongside people emojis in a public post - and where in a stream of emojis it appeared, and how many were placed there. And how different it might appear on an iPhone versus an Android phone. These are hieroglyphs in the making, but evolving so quickly.

This shadowy consortium is like the priests in ancient Egypt who hoarded the use of hieroglyphs. Determining intent is hard enough with traditional alphabet-based languages... imagine how tough it's going to be when we have 20,000 emojis... or 100,000. Or a million?

This episode was super interesting and fascinating, major props to Lucy for helming it! I’d be super interested in the poop emoji history or even follow up episodes to this!

Can’t wait to see future episodes because this series so far has been incredible!

@oswell_endswell: I couldn't agree more!

Man, what a fantastic episode! I thought 50 minutes of emoji talk would be boring but Lucy did an incredible job hosting which made it super intersting and informative.

Big props to y'all and also Jan for the great editing!

Of the new shows, this is the one which feels like an unmitigated success (or, at least, of the weekly additions - I also loved Guilty Treasures). Something new for the site but which also feels entirely at home on it. Funny, cosy viewing and genuinely interesting. I love Lucy and Tamoor.

Great episode! For those curious about further info, some of the same topics are touched on in this episode of 99% Invisible:

But who decides what emojis are available to users, and who makes the actual designs? Independent radio and film producer Mark Bramhill took it upon himself to find out and, in the process, ended up developing and pitching his own idea for a new emoji.

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/person-lotus-position/

The reason emoji can't be removed is because UNICODE Consortium primarily cares about documents being compatible and their meaning the same not just between devices and software but also across time. Someone reading a really old email must be able to see that document exactly as it was intended. And that's why they cannot be removed

The consortium kinda had this problem dumped on them. Before this their mission was to encode existing forms of text communication so that they would be portable. The only reason they had to include them was because due to those Japanese phone makers using some bits left over after encoding their characters to add some snazzy logos and stuff and they were used in text with specific meaning so they had to include them. Also included are all the characters from the wingdings font because they too have been used with specific meaning. That's why there is a "Person in suit, levitating" in there because wingdings included a stylized exclamation mark with a person in a suit hovering...

KEKW and POGCHAMP etc as words would be for the dictionaries (Oxford, Merriam-Webster) to add not the UNICODE consortium. But Twitch emojis have meaning and are recorded in documents (chat logs) that may need to be preserved and as such they may need to be included in UNICODE because that is the primary concern of the UNICODE Consortium. Just like what happened with the original emojis made by the Japanese phone carriers or the wingdings. Which might be tricky because they may be copyrighted...

I know this ep is specifically about emoji but its odd there wasnt at least a brief mention of special unicode characters and alt-codes . in my mind ☺ ☻ ♥ were the 'original emojis'.

Aww when i saw the title and heard about the ability for anyone to submit their emoji ideas, i imagined that there would be this lawless group of internet users that would social engineer their plans through and threaten the outsiders for crossing paths with them.

Then it turned out that money was involved and that the big companies were the ones involved :( Boring dystopia indeed!

I'm so happy to see just how deep they are diving into these topics! Great series.

Liked this one way more than the initial episode. More informative and less flash-in-the-pan internet culture.

i thought ep 1 was a surprisingly good discussion about something i didn't need to know , but frankly while i still think that i think this was even better. it was alot more interesting than i expected so nice work guys.

that said please work on audio balancing a little better , tam was a good bit quieter than lucy. as someone who was trying to watch with their SO sleeping i kept having to adjust it n eventually had to just turn it off till he got up since her voice kept waking him over his sleeping headphones. its not the only content to have that issue lately but it was alot more apparent than usual here. bakalar was a nice middle ground volume wise.

As someone who cannot stand the cry-laughing emoji, thank you all for ruining my night with the information that not only is it the most popular emoji (14.2% when you combine the two angles), but that bit about it being OED’s word of 2015.

For my part, I would love to see a dril retrospective (as someone suggested last week). From Weird Internet, to the insane quotability, to the time they doxxed themselves and everyone kinda just ignored it, dril has been one of the true bastions of fun online.

@lucyjamesgames: As a fellow Geordie this whole thing makes me strangely proud ;)

Excellent episode with a surprisingly interesting topic!

I liked this episode considerably more than the last one (which wasn't even bad, to be fair). Fascinating stuff.

That theme song is a banger! Anyone know who made it?

This was great! Enjoyed the first episode, but this one felt like it stepped up to another level. Surprisingly deep topic, great chemistry, engaging and genuinely informative discussion, really smooth production and editing - just really well done all around, by everyone involved. I think I'm officially hooked on this series.

@ianmarkx: I believe it's "Synthetic Life" by Julian Emery feat. Dana Jean Phoenix

this one was real fun

The intersection of emojis and judicial rulings is utterly fascinating. I've never even thought about it but you're right, social systems are going to have to become so much more savvy at dealing with cultural phenomena like that.

What a good show. Tam and Lucy are awesome additions to the bomb crew. Bakalar is fine 😅

No way do American's actually pronounce it "Consortshum". Surely?

@peterab: yah that's definitely it..... but it must be an 8-bit instrumental or something. thanks.

Haha, I actually submitted an emoji proposal just a couple of months ago. It's even there in the episode! For those of you who are curious, this is what the proposal document looks like: Proposal-for-emoji-HAND-HOLDING-THUMB.pdf. It's got a comparison to "elephant" and everything!

Wow, did not expect to see this episode go in these directions! What a tangled web

I try to avoid using emojis, but it feels like you kind of have to in situations like Lucy described for work etc. Unicode smiles forever : ) : ) : )

What a great show. Thank you!

emoticons > emoji

@tdous: 🥲🥲🥲

@aznan: yoo! Fingers crossed it makes it!

@janman I hope it's okay to tag you. This episode is not part of the very online show feed, is tagged as premium, but isn't in the premium only video feed.

@lucyjamesgames said:

Don't you mean "thumbs held" :)