145: Face With Tears of Joy (live with Keith Houston and friends)

Emoji, once regarded as some kind of frivolous nonsense, have become an important way we communicate online. But how did these little pictures come to our devices? What is the Unicode Consortium, and how did they get involved? And who is the Levitating Suit Guy? Fear not; author Keith Houston is here to give us the whole story in front of a live audience. Keith is the author of Face With Tears of Joy: A Natural History of Emoji.

Timestamps

00:00 Start

02:21 Introducing Keith Houston, author of Face With Tears of Joy

03:28 Put your top five emoji in chat

08:03 What's the state of emoji now?

10:11 How did the Unicode Consortium get involved?

22:30 The strange history of Levitating Suit Guy

27:37 The latest emoji in v17.0

30:12 Changes to some emoji

38:22 What gives an emoji staying power?

47:12 Related or Not: Theme by David