MATT PARKER: It is with great pleasure that I bring to the stage,
both a friend of mine, and famously "that guy from the internet":
he's wearing a slightly off-red shirt,
can you please put your hands together and welcome to the stage, it's Tom Scott!
TOM SCOTT: Thank you!
Where's the clicker? Matt, where'd you put the clicker?
Ah! Great. Black clicker, black table. It's wonderful.
Hello, my name is Tom Scott. Hello!
Wonderful, you're alive. I am an accidental emoji expert.
I didn't mean -- also, sorry, let's get one thing out of the way,
this is going to be less of a polished talk than I normally do,
there are two reasons for that:
one, I didn't quite rehearse as much as I should,
and two, I hate shtick.
I hate the idea that you become "that person known for that thing"
and yet I've plenty of shticks in my time.
I had the pirate shtick, that was a bad year.
And now I have the emoji shtick. And I didn't mean to.
I didn't mean to. But me and a friend came up with an idea,
we built a messenger on your phone that you can only send emoji through.
Even your username had to be emoji.
And we get 70,000 people signing up to that because they all went
"What? I've got to get an emoji as my username? What do I do?"
and it turns out you can be rude in emoji, really creatively.
We thought we wouldn't have to put a swear filter on that.
We did. Lot of aubergines. A lot of aubergines.
We killed that, after just under a year.
But then I went and make this, which is a full size emoji keyboard.
I say full size, it's 14 keyboards. There are a lot of emoji. All hooked up.
But as a result of that, it turns out that I now know
most of the technical details of how emoji works.
Also, it turns out that I am now an expert on emoji to the extent
that Radio 2 called me up and said 'can you bring your keyboard in',
I thought: Radio. Keyboard.
And literally, there was a moment where they said
"could you just... what does it sound like to type on?"
Well, it sounds like a keyboard.
So I did that. So I am an accidental and grumpy emoji expert.
These are the first emoji.
These are the first ones that were ever made.
I think they've been coloured here, which they weren't normally,
but one engineer in Japan, decided that they had a bit --
because computers, which is all the detail you're getting in a 10-minute talk,
there was a bit of room left over.
So there's the idea of text encoding, which is where you take
the letters than we write in, and you turn them into 1s and 0s
that computers can understand.
America kind of did that first? Or at least, did the big worldwide version of that.
So that's great, you have A-Z, 0-9, doesn't take up that much room.
Japan: loads more characters, you needed a bit more room.
And because computers, they had a bit of space left over.
So one engineer goes, you know what? We can put pictures in there.
'Cos we're basically sending a load of different pictures for each character
let's add some more. So those are the first emoji.
Some transport, some star signs, some numbers.
And they're just used on one mobile network.
And then the next mobile network went "that is a brilliant idea,
"we're having that." Only they used a completely different and incompatible system
and then a third network did the same. And this was fine.
They didn't work together.
And then, along came the Unicode Consortium!
Which does sound like a sci-fi baddie, but they're actually
the linguists and computer scientists in charge of making sure
that everyone can talk to each other online.
The reason that someone in Japan can send you a text, in Japanese,
and it will now arrive on your phone intact is because of these guys.
The most amazing thing in computer standardisation that's ever been done.
They went to France, they looked at France,
they said "you're mostly like English, that's fine,
"you've got a little bit of a weird letter here, that's fine,
"we can take -- thanks, we're going to take your letters,
"and put them just there in the standard. You OK? You're cool."
All right. They went to Russia. Russia and then all there. They said,
"oh, you've got a whole different alphabet.
"All right, that's fine. We're going to take your alphabet.
"Oh! Sorry, Belarus, you've got some more letters.
"Okay, we're going to take all those,
"and we're going to put them just there."
And then they got to Japan, and they went "bloody hell...
"right, Japan, okay, that's fine, we've got all these,
"and we'll put them right there... okay, right, that's fine,
"we're going to put them in the standard just in...
"Japan, what are those?"
And Japan's like, "they're emoji. We use them to talk."
"Those are not letters."
"Don't care. We use them to communicate. They're characters.
"You've got to include them. You know, two-way...?"
"What do you think?"
"Well, we let America have the smiley face, didn't we?"
"Right, fine, fine, Japan, we're going to take those,
"we're going to put them in there,
"and no-one is going to care."
And no-one did care, and then Apple came along.
And Apple wanted to sell iPhones in Japan,
so they put an emoji keyboard on there
and no-one noticed for a little while
and then one person in Britain -- sorry, in America, went..
"hurr! I can send piles of poo to my friends!"
So they did. And their friends went "how did you...
"how did you do that? Show me!"
And soon there's this ready-made viral explosion of piles of poo.
Which I guess is dysentry.
And now we have emoji cushions and emoji pillows.
That's a photo by my friend Dan, who was walking around Dalston,
found emoji pillows, and then found another shop selling...
turns out there's a lot of emoji pillows in Dalston, if anyone wants one.
This is the Unicode Consortium's motto.
It is: "enabling people around the world to use computers in any language".
This is how the world sees the Emoji Consor-- er, the Uni--
'Emoji Consortium'! Spot the Freudian slip.
This is how the world sees the Unicode Consortium's motto:
So, Unicode 9's out soon. And this is how I see them talking to the world,
it's like "hey, world, Unicode 9 is out now, and it's amazing!
"It's got to Osage alphabet in it!" This is an alphabet
that was only designed a few years ago. This is amazing.
"It's got the Georgian Lari symbol." Brand new currency symbol. It's in there.
They're just sat down in committe meetings, and had really vicious fights
between different representatives from different countries
about how particular languages should go in,
because it's actually really complicated.
And the world went "k".
"By the way," they say, "we've got some new emoji too."
And suddenly we care!
Does anyone know what this emoji is?
Does anyone know what this emoji is, by the way?
["You!"] Is that me? Yeah, it's close. Seriously, quick shout out...
["Triumph!"] Triumph! Yes! Who was up there first?
There is a measuring tape going to the lady...
all right, so this is... this is worrying. This might not work,
let's see if we can get... hey-up!
Missed by a mile! I did not do well at sports.
Yeah, it's 'look of triumph' which no-one actually uses it for,
because it was designed in Japan, that's a different cultural reference,
which is great, so.
The 2016 emoji are out soon.
Here are some of them. This is from Emojipedia, which is a thing.
They allow re-use of this with credit.
These are some of what we've got. This is about the half the candidates.
We've got 'nauseated face', let's be honest, that's overdue.
We've got 'duck', obviously that's vital.
We don't have 'duckface', which feels like it should be in there.
We do have 'selfie'.
So you can put that next to any emoji now, just put that on it.
We also have 'dancing man', and I'll get back to him in a minute.
They're going to get ratified probably in a meeting in May 2016
they'll be on your phone by the end of the year.
Probably.
Maybe.
But what's interesting, for me at least, is the 2017 emoji.
'Cos we've had the first few candidates for that now,
we might have 'chinese takeout box' and 'skeptical face with one eyebrow raised',
but that's not the interesting thing.
Because recently we've had these. We've had skin tone modifiers.
Now these are really important, these are fantastic,
because it means it's not all default yellow.
As anyone who's watched the Simpsons knows, yellow is not default neutral.
But: if you want to actually make one of these,
behind the scenes you are putting the regular emoji in,
and then you are putting what is called a 'skin tone modifier' or a 'tag character'.
From 1 to 5 on the Fitzpatrick scale, which is a skin tone scale.
So there's actually two separate characters there
and they get merged together.
The 2017 emojis are going to get more tags. If proposal--
I said this was a lot of detail--
if proposal TR52 gets ratified next year.
And the tag characters that are going to get added are for gender...
gender, hair colour and possibly direction.
Direction's easy, it's so that everyone agrees which way the gun is pointing
when you do an emoji that someone shot someone.
It's good for, like, I don't know, if you've shot someone.
Hair colour. It's going to be black, brown, red, grey, blond and...
what have I forgotten? Who have I missed?
["White!"] No...
Bald! That's it! No hair at all. I know at least three people in here
who have different hair colours to that.
If you have an issue with that,
please take it up with the Unicode Consortium, not me.
Which is taken, I swear, from the list of hair colours that are valid for
US drivers' licenses and the UN Grounds Pass.
I looked at the specification, that's where they got the list from.
So you'll be able to have a different skin colour, different hair colour,
and crucially, different gender presentation. Because:
on the left is how Apple says 'dancer'.
And on the right is how Android said 'dancer' until recently.
So if you were a woman and you said "I'm feeling like this today,"
it did not go well when it came through to an Android user.
So there is now a separate woman dancer and man dancer,
but for everything else the idea is you have a character
and then a gender symbol, which is great,
because currently the Unicode construction worker is male
and the Unicode receptionist is female
because apparently it's the 1980s.
And if you think this is ridiculous, this is my final point,
if you think this is ridiculous, this is too much,
this is something no-one should care about,
this is just a lot of, of... wrangling over a minor detail,
yes it sort of is. And that boardroom meeting
will have a lot of things to decide about it.
But if you think this is not something you care about,
just imagine how the people in that board meeting feel.
Because they've got a long list --
I've seen the agenda for the last meeting, I read it,
it's got all sorts of really wonderful things.
Some of the best linguistics,
some of the best computer scientists,
some of the best computational linguists
are going to be in that room deciding really important things
about language and how we're going to use it
and the only thing that the press are going to care about in 2017
is whether there is going to be a condom emoji.
My name's Tom Scott, enjoy the night!
MATT PARKER: Tom Scott, ladies and gentlemen!
If we've learned anything from Tom Scott,
it is: shtick happens.
And vote yes on Proposition TR52!
So there you go. And -- Tom! True YouTube professional.
He was talking, someone bumped a glass over,
he paused for an edit break...
TOM SCOTT: I didn't even notice I'd done that!
MATT PARKER: and then picked up from the most recent sentence fragment,
so if you could all just mentally edit that bit out...!
[Translating these subtitles? Add your name here!]