How long did it take you to get into Emojis? If you’re like me, you were late to join the bandwagon; however, once that line was crossed, there was no going back, was there?
Emojis came from Japan – where else? – and quickly became popular, perhaps even more than emoticons we manually type out using text/characters. They surely make life easier, although I suppose Emojis were not conceived with the idea of being ethnically sensitive.
Apparently, Apple is going to change that in the near future, thanks to MTV Act, or someone from there who probably had a lot of downtime in recent times. They wrote Tim Cook directly, and while he didn’t reply personally in the fashion of Steve Jobs, he did forward the email to someone who could do something about it – Katie Cotton.
The email was along the lines of “why are the Emojis mostly white (people)”?
Cotton got back to MTV Act quickly:
Tim forwarded your email to me. We agree with you. Our emoji characters are based on the Unicode standard, which is necessary for them to be displayed properly across many platforms. There needs to be more diversity in the emoji character set, and we have been working closely with the Unicode Consortium in an effort to update the standard.
So ethnic sensitivity is what we’re seeing in action, and we just might see United Colors of Benetton-like Emojis soon.
What do you think about this fuss (about nothing, I think)?
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