- #PETITION TO REMOVE GAY FLAG EMOJI SKIN#
- #PETITION TO REMOVE GAY FLAG EMOJI ANDROID#
- #PETITION TO REMOVE GAY FLAG EMOJI SOFTWARE#
Which is why she waited in the Hyatt hotel next to the campus, with several cases of wine, ready to give away.įrom the other side of the door, I could only guess at what the committee discussed. It is these men whom Curry hoped to convince about the importance of the white wine emoji. When I looked through the small window of the closed door at the Seattle meeting in July, I saw mostly white male engineers from California. Because you really need to look at this from all different vantage points.”īut diversity is in the eye of the beholder.
#PETITION TO REMOVE GAY FLAG EMOJI SOFTWARE#
“So the Emoji Sub Committee has linguists, designers, and software developers. “The simple answer to how you decide is: You get a diverse set of people discussing it,” says Greg Welsch, a member of the Unicode board of directors. Then, after about four days of debate, decisions are made. (Proposals for new emoji can be made electronically.) The criteria for a new emoji appears inscrutable to some, but most proposals constitute several pages with data on the would-be emoji’s importance, its potential to be widely used, and its distinctiveness. “You never talk about the pipes in your house unless something breaks.”Īt each meeting, the committee considers petitions from all over the world. Think of Unicode like plumbing, she explains.
#PETITION TO REMOVE GAY FLAG EMOJI ANDROID#
“Even though Unicode is the foundation of all text on modern mobile devices and computers - so all your Android phones, iPhones, Windows, everything - people still are not very much aware of it,” says Moore. Different carriers might have their own emoji designers, but the meaning of the emoji is always the same. This also explains is why there’s one universal emoji keyboard. “That’s why all the main mobile carriers decided in the mid-2000’s that it was urgent to start standardizing emoji. “So say you’re texting your boyfriend and you want to say ‘I love you’ and you send him a heart, but what comes out on his phone is something completely different. Think of it as solving the digital tower of Babel problem, says Lisa Moore, who has chaired the Unicode Technical Committee for the past 20 years. They have to agree on standardization to keep miscommunication between the different carriers in check. Each tech giant sends one representative to sit at the table of this Supreme Court of our digital communication.
Companies that normally are each others’ biggest rivals are forced into one room to cooperate. So who’s in the Unicode Consortium? As you might suspect, it’s corporate tech giants such as Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Huawei. And in order for all computer systems to understand each other, you need someone to standardize these codes. Computers do not speak languages, they speak code. “Unicode has sort of a reputation like a mysterious lord of the global keyboard in Silicon Valley,” Curry says.īesides being the high council in the emoji universe, the Unicode Consortium has the much larger task of translating all the world languages into codes that computers understand. THE EMOJI SUBCOMMITTEE, as it’s properly called, is part of the Unicode Consortium, the organization responsible for standardizing languages into codes useable for computers. Who are the people behind this committee? How did they come to be the gatekeepers to the world’s first genuinely universal language? What kind of emoji discussions are they having? And why do so few people know about this mysterious cabal?
#PETITION TO REMOVE GAY FLAG EMOJI SKIN#
That means that a handful of people select who and what is included - whether it’s a skin color, a national flag, a woman wearing a hijab, or even a glass of white wine. The committee decides which emoji characters are added to almost every device and platform that we use around the world.