💬 The Wrap
Greetings from Belgium, folks! Lots of 🍫, 🧇, and 🍺 around these parts!
Beginning its rollout in July of this year, Facebook’s latest emoji update is now available for a majority of users worldwide. This means that emojis such as 😵💫 Face with Spiral Eyes, 😮💨 Face Exhaling, and 2021’s Most Popular New Emoji the ❤️🔥 Heart on Fire can be sent and seen on the social network and its associated Messenger platform.
This update also means that majority of vendors now support the Emoji 13.1 recommendations made late last year, and others are also expected to do so soon: Emoji 13.1 support has been included in recent WhatsApp for Android beta releases, while Microsoft previewed Emoji 13.1 designs when unveiling their new Fluent emoji set. 🔜📲
While Emoji 13.1 continues to spread across vendors, Emoji 14.0 is due to be officially finalized in just under three weeks' time. While the list is still subject to change, we previewed what these draft emoji candidates may look like as part of last month's World Emoji Day 2021. 🆕🖼️
Speaking of World Emoji Day, if you happened to miss any of the other major revelations in the lead-up to and/or on the day itself, we've got you covered: What’s New on World Emoji Day 2021. 📅📰
Another piece of news: following World Emoji Day, we announced that Emojipedia is now part of Zedge. What does this mean for you as an Emojipedia user and Emoji Wrap subscriber? Honestly, not a lot: our team consists of the same friendly faces, and we'll continue to be the #1 emoji resource in the world under Zedge's stewardship. 🔝📙
This edition of the Emoji Wrap also includes discussions of intergenerational emoji use, thoughts on how emojis are enriching digital communication, and information on how you can become a researcher for Unicode's Emoji Subcommittee. All this and more linked below! 🔗👇
📰 News
📖 Facebook Emoji 13.1 Changelog
Facebook's 2021 update is now available to a majority of global users, bringing late 2020's Emoji 13.1 to Facebook, Facebook Messenger, and their associated apps. This changelog also briefly discusses Facebook's summer 2020 emoji update, which brought a variety of gender-neutral designs to the platform alongside the likes of 🥲 Smiling Face with Tear, 🤌 Pinched Fingers, and 🧑🍼 Person Feeding Baby.
📅 What’s New on World Emoji Day 2021
We breakdown the biggest happenings of World Emoji Day 2021, such as Google's latest emoji update, a brand new design aesthetic for Windows emojis, and our Emojipedia preview of the draft emoji candidates expected to be recommended for emoji support in next month's Emoji 14.0.
🇦🇫 What About the Afghanistan Flag Emoji?
Recent events in Afghanistan could eventually lead to a change in how the 🇦🇫 Flag for Afghanistan emoji is represented by emoji vendors. How and why that may be the case is discussed here.
💭 Interesting
🙂 Sending Smiley Emojis? They Now Mean Different Things to Different People
It's well documented that each new generation can forge its own path when it comes to how they use slang to react to and describe the world around them, but emojis are now also being co-opted this intergenerational gulf in understanding. While anecdotal interpretation of an emoji does not a widespread meaning make, we at Emojipedia have seen strong indications of at least some of the interpretations discussed in this article.
💗 Emojis aren’t debasing language – they’re enriching it
Cognitive Science lecturer and emoji researcher Benjamin Weissman puts forth the case for how emojis enrich our digital communications. Weissman's academic investigations into emojis have indicated that our brains react to sarcastic emoji use in a similar manner to sarcasm conveyed through words.
🤬 Tackling online hate speech one emoji at a time
A team of researchers from the University of Oxford has been investigating how emojis can be used to subvert social platform's AI content moderation systems. This is prescient research given the recent racist use of certain emojis on display after the Euro 2020 finals.
👥 The little-known human stories behind emoji designs
This BBC article details the origins of the 🕴️ Person in Suit Levitating, 🥟 Dumpling, and 🦚 Peacock. In doing so, it focuses on the people behind these emojis, discussing how different people's perspectives, choices, and talents can lead them to the emoji keyboard.
🔎 Become a Researcher for the Emoji Subcommittee
The chairperson of the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee Jennifer Daniel is looking to enlist, in her own words, "researchers 📊 with expertise in communication 🔡/🗣️ on a hyper local 🧉 and global scale 🥲 to join the Emoji Subcommittee". If that sounds like you and you'd be willing to volunteer a few hours a week, send your resume etc to [email protected]. 📧
🤗 Lastly
That's all for our latest edition of the Emoji Wrap newsletter, Emojipedia's never-more-than-once-a-month emoji news roundup. 📰🌯
Thank you, as always, to our regular readers 🙏🙏 and of course hello to our new subscribers! 👋👋
If you'd like to keep up-to-date with the latest emoji news as it happens, you can follow Emojipedia on Twitter, as well as the members of our Emojipedia team:
- 🚢 Chief Emoji Officer Jeremy Burge
- 📚 Senior Emoji Lexicographer Jane Solomon
- 🙋♂️ Me, Deputy Emoji Officer Keith Broni
Stay safe, folks! 💕