Standardising the look of the irrepressible emoji must have been tricky
Caner Elci/Alamy
Face with Tears of Joy
Keith Houston (W. W. Norton)
If a picture is worth a thousand words, then what of emoji, that ever-increasingly important part of our lexicon? Face with Tears of Joy: A natural history of emoji by Keith Houston has some insights, as it charts the story of these odd characters and how they infiltrated daily communications.
A history of emoji, where they came from and how they came to dominate our discourse is much needed, and Houston is a witty, pacey raconteur, taking us through their genesis and managing to excavate new nuggets that track them back a decade before their widely accepted birth date.
It is a clever device. By extending the family tree of emoji back into 1980s niche Japanese computer hardware, rather than their widely accepted origin, closer to the turn of the millennium, Houston brings insight that will be novel to many readers, whether or not they are obsessed with peppering their missives with emoji.
Clearly, this book is deeply researched, as is clear from the moment you realise that Houston waded through the minutes of the various subcommittees of the Unicode Consortium, the standards body that quickly entered a power vacuum in the early 2000s to help social networks and phone providers ensure that images are depicted in a relatively similar way, wherever they crop up.
So what made emoji such a powerful cultural movement? While Houston can linger on producing a chronology of these images, he does begin to tackle the huge philosophical question of distilling the millions of perceptions of commonly used items into a single understanding across societies and cultures.
Take one short section on how Facebook users reacted to a video of the 2017 terrorist attack on Westminster Bridge in London. When readers wanted to leave a reaction, the platform only let them pick one of six emoji, none of which felt particularly apposite. Houston’s writing here is really insightful.
Typewriter artists created images from keystrokes, a precursor to the emoticons that begat emoji
Sadly, throughout the book, Houston backs away from digging deeper into such insights and experiments. He also fails to stay with the fascinating-sounding Unicode meetings, as decisions are taken on whether to admit images for tacos and other popular everyday items onto hundreds of millions of phones globally. Instead, we get a Wikipedia-style listing of events as they happened.
This chronological approach is important, but it is also replicated in a separate timeline of around a dozen pages at the end of the book. Too often, it felt like you could read the bullet-pointed summary and learn as much about emoji and their history as you would if you had read the preceding 180 pages.
Which is a shame. Houston convincingly makes the case that emoji need to be studied carefully and their cultural impact taken seriously. It just isn’t clear why we are given minute details in one example to the exclusion of others. We are told, for example, about the media reporting of Kim Kardashian’s 2015 Kimoji app, which presented users with images of the reality TV star in different emotional states. It apparently had 9000 downloads per millisecond at its peak, writes Houston. He goes on to back a more realistic number reported by others – 9000 downloads per second. Why is this so important, except to fill space?
That said, there are some charming and illuminating nuggets about this still-quite-new means of communicating. Besides winding back emoji’s big-bang moment, Houston unearths vignettes about early typewriter artists who created beautiful images from keystrokes, a precursor to the emoticons that themselves begat emoji.
All in, Face with Tears of Joy is a comprehensive and often illuminating read. But to me, it felt too often as if it was just filling pages that could have been more meaningfully filled with analysis of the “why” and the “then what” of the adoption of emoji, especially over the past two decades.
In the end, Houston’s book is a valuable start on the cultural deconstruction of emoji. I will look forward to many more books on that subject in the future.
Chris Stokel-Walker is a technology writer based in Newcastle, UK
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