Wed, Jun 22, 2016 page14

• Apple’s ‘emojification’ feature could curb creativity

  • NY Times News Service
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  At last week’s Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple Inc’s annual showcase of new tech, the company announced a special texting feature coming soon to iPhones.

  “You know, sometimes you’ve typed a whole message and you realize at the end that you’re entirely lacking in emojification,” Apple senior vice president of software Craig Federighi said.

  “So we provided the solution: When you tap on the emoji button, we’ll highlight all the emojifiable words there, and you can just tap, tap, tap, tap and emojify,” he said.

  “Children of tomorrow will have no understanding of the English language,” Federighi said jokingly.

  However, Apple’s new emoji feature seems more likely to impede a different kind of skill: creating surprising, figurative and subversive forms of individual expression out of the digital ephemera that populate our devices.

  In a rush to harness the power of the Web’s most evocative cultural units — emojis and their hyperactive cousins, GIFs — tech companies, corporate brands and entrepreneurial social-media stars could risk inadvertently flattening the creative world that has sprung up around them.

  Emojis have emerged as cultural forces in and of themselves. The crisp, candy-colored glyphs form a modern emotional palette, and it is growing: Yesterday, the Unicode Consortium, the body that standardizes emoji, was scheduled to release 72 new ones that are soon to make their way to our fingertips, including a black heart, a wilted flower and a pregnant woman.

  If emoji encourage visual puns and whimsical juxtapositions, GIFs inspire a sharp curatorial sensibility. The art lies in detecting the richest slices of popular media — film, TV or amateur video — and punctuating their greatness by setting them on infinite repeat. The best “reaction” GIFs — those chosen to inject human expression in online conversation — feel both emotionally familiar and visually surprising.

  However, when emojis and GIFs are filtered through the interests of tech companies, they often become slickly automated.

  In addition to Apple’s “emojification” feature, there is Twitter Inc’s new GIF keyboard (a partnership with GIF company Giphy Inc, which has been pumped with US$78.95 million worth of funding since 2013). It directs Twitter users to choose from a suite of emotional reactions, including “Agree,” “Applause,” “Aww” and “Eww,” which conjures a set of appropriate GIFs, front-loaded with those featuring the Internet’s most GIFable celebrities, such as Beyonce and Oprah Winfrey.

  Buying into these features means giving tech companies the power to shape our creative expressions in ways that further enrich the companies themselves. A limited emotional range helps collect data on users’ states of mind. Twitter advertisers can now target users based on the emojis they tweet.

  The commodification of digital culture has engendered more explicit corporate branding, too. On Snapchat, where users embellish their selfies with emojis, crayon scribbles and elaborate “lenses” that cover their faces with virtual masks, marketers such as McDonalds Corp are seizing the opportunity to write their messages across people’s faces.

  Meanwhile, as traditional emojis expand beyond their Japanese roots, tech companies such as Apple, Microsoft Corp and Google (all voting members of Unicode) have become responsible for making cultural, and sometimes political, choices in determining which new emoji will make the cut.

  Some additions to the emoji repertoire are informed by experts: Unicode has consulted the Cornell Lab of Ornithology for bird emoji advice. Others are culled from “popular requests from online communities” and proposals submitted by the public.

  Companies have also made bids to influence the result, although Unicode says it rejects emojis “strongly associated with a particular brand.”

  Last year, ad agency Havas London started a campaign on behalf of Durex, calling for a condom emoji. Cerveza Indio wants a dark beer emoji. Ballantine’s has championed a glass of whisky. The rice company La Fallera suggested a paella emoji. (The whisky and paella made the cut; both were expected to be released yesterday.)

  For the Olympics, Unicode recently considered encoding a rifle emoji alongside other sport-themed glyphs, but members voted it down.

  “When vendors looked at it, they didn’t see a lot of additional value in adding it,” Unicode spokesman Mark Davis said. “There’s already a firearm in Unicode.”

  That decision has helped stoke concerns that modern visual language is being shaped by the political or financial priorities of gigantic tech companies. While many people do not see the advantage of emojifying another gun, others wonder whether heightened scrutiny could lead to less idiosyncratic, less interesting characters.

  “One of the things that make emoji fun is this quirky weird list that came about through accidents of history,” said Jeremy Burge, the founder of Emojipedia and a member of Unicode’s emoji subcommittee.

  “The bomb, the cigarette, the dripping syringe — it’s crazy to think that all of those would make it in today,” he said.
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