Face with Tears of Joy Review: New Book is an enlightening but defective look at the impact of emojis

Face with tears of joy
Keith Houston (WW Norton)

If an image is worth a thousand words, when what about emoji, this increasingly important part of our lexicon? Face with tears of joy: a natural story of emoji By Keith Houston has some ideas, because she draws the story of these strange characters and how they infiltrated daily communications.

A story of Emoji, where they come from and how they came to dominate our speech is essential, and Houston is a spiritual and rhythmic storyteller, taking us through their Genesis and managed to search new nuggets which find them a decade before their widely accepted date of birth.

It is an intelligent device. By extending the genealogical tree of emoji to the Japanese computer equipment of niche from the 1980s, rather than their largely accepted origin, closer to the millennial turning point, Houston brings an overview which will be new to many readers, whether or not they are obsessed with the pivot of their missives with Emoji.

Obviously, this book is deeply studied, as is clear from the moment you realize that Houston has woven in the minutes of the various sub-commies of the Unicode consortium, the body of standards which quickly entered a power vacuum in the early 2000s to help social networks and telephony suppliers.

So what made emoji such a powerful cultural movement? Although Houston can dwell on the production of a chronology of these images, he begins to tackle the huge philosophical question of distilling the millions of elements of the elements commonly used in a single understanding in societies and cultures.

Take a short section on how Facebook users reacted to a video of the 2017 terrorist attack on Westminster Bridge in London. When the readers wanted to leave a reaction, the platform only let them choose one of the six emoji, which none seemed particularly relevant. Houston’s writing here is really insightful.

Unfortunately, throughout the book, Houston withdraws from digging more deeply in such ideas and experiences. Nor is it left with unicode meetings with a fascinating consonance, because decisions are made to admit images for tacos and other everyday articles on hundreds of millions of phones worldwide. Instead, we get a list of Wikipedia style events as they occurred.

This chronological approach is important, but it is also reproduced in a chronology distinct from about a dozen pages at the end of the book. Too often, it seemed that you could read the ball summary and learn as much about the emoji and their story as you would do if you had read the previous 180 pages.

Which is a shame. Houston proves convincingly the case that emoji must be studied with care and their cultural impact taken seriously. It is simply not clear why we have tiny details in an example to the exclusion of others. We are told, for example, on the Kim Kardashian Kimoji’s media reports, which presented to users of the reality TV star in different emotional states. He apparently had 9,000 downloads by Milliseconde to his peak, written Houston. He continues by supporting a more realistic number reported by others – 9000 downloads per second. Why is it so important, except to fill the space?

That said, there are charming and enlightening nuggets on this new means of communication still completely. In addition to the liquidation of Emoji’s Big-Bang’s moment, Houston has vignettes on the first typewriting machine artists who created beautiful images from Keystroke, a precursor of emoticons that themselves generated the Emoji.

In everything, Face with tears of joy is a complete and often enlightening reading. But for me, it was too often as if it were only filling out pages which could have been more significantly of analysis of the “why” and the “then what” of the adoption of emoji, especially in the past two decades.

In the end, Houston’s book is a precious beginning on the cultural deconstruction of emoji. I look forward to many other books on this subject in the future.

Chris Stokel-Walker is a newcastle-based technology writer in the United Kingdom,

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