FACE WITH TEARS OF JOY

A look at the complex, often serious world of emoji’s creators, gatekeepers, and enthusiasts.

This book by information-technology writer Houston (Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator, 2023, etc.) comes at the end of a sort of Cambrian Explosion for emoji: For much of the 2010s, thousands of tiny icons emerged on programs and smartphones. Each “emoji season,” as he shows, prompts heated debates over which images were and weren’t included. But Houston also uses emoji to explore a deeper story about how technologies become ubiquitous (or don’t), how they change communication, and what emoji says about our cultural blind spots. The beginnings of emoji are surprisingly difficult to pin down—various proprietary software dating to the ’70s had some version of the images—but by the 2000s a sizable vocabulary and a certain design consistency emerged from its native Japan and beyond. The Unicode Consortium, which decides which emoji are made available, has had to make countless decisions, most recently around matters of inclusion and bias—its default yellow (read: white) faces now include multiple skin tones, and it addressed biases in depictions of professions as exclusively male (construction worker) or female (dancer). Houston can get deep in the weeds about the Unicode Consortium’s internal squabbles, which leaves less room for some other fascinating byways, like how emoji has impacted grammar and communication and why “stickers” and proprietary “celebrity ’moji,” designed to avoid Unicode’s strictures and turn a profit for their creators, have often fallen flat. Houston knows that any language whose mascot is a smiling poop pile can be treated only so seriously, so the text is charmingly filled with emoji as illustrations and within sentences, making it both a product of a new way of communicating as well as a study of it.

A pleasurable and well-researched journey into pop iconography.