the_emoji_code

THE EMOJI CODE by Profressor Vyvyan Evans

2017. Micheal O'Mara Books. Hardback.

An entire 240 page book on Emoji? Do chat message pictographs deserve
such scholarly academic treatment??

"No" is my considered answer having read this book. Giving Emoji the
full linguistic treatment is giving too much credence to this new form
of language. There's some good ideas about Emoji adding body language
and providing multi-modal communication to text messaging, but
all-in-all this book is twice as long as it needs to be. Emoji just
doesn't warrant the attention that it gets in this treatise.

There are a few famous Emoji users cited, none of whom I respect.
UK Tennis star Andy Murray's emoji-only Wedding day message is
presented and explained. Australia's perennial Deputy Prime Minister
Julia Bishop's emoji-laden messages are mentioned more than once.
A lightweight politician and a lightweight subject.

This book is almost square in size, it's only just taller than it is
wide and it's a hardback. There are good pictorial pages in the middle
but on the whole the book seems jokey.

Vyvyan Evans mentions George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four a few times
in this book, but mostly in the context of when a proposed Winter
Olympics Emoji, representing the skiing/shooting crossover event, gets
reserved as an Emoji but doesn't make it into production as a
rifle/crosshairs design. Vyvyan (I imagine it is pronounced "Vivian")
presents this as censorship but misses the larger point of Newspeak as
explained in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Newspeak was a language designed to shrink each year. Words were
removed from the vocabulary each year, to the end goal that thoughts
that were against The Party would no longer be expressible in
words. Emoji seems to be shrinking the language, to the extent that
only happy pictograms can be expressed. That is a better Nineteen
Eighty-Four comparison than what Evans comes up with.

Also released in 2017, I'm guessing too late for this book to cover,
was a full-length animated movie, The Emoji Movie. Like this book, it
was too lengthy a treatment of a pretty simple subject. It was panned.
One wag put it third in the list of famous Pixar movies. Moster's Inc:
What if Monsters have feelings? Toy Story: What if Toys have feelings?
The Emoji Movie: What is Feelings have feelings?

                                            27th November 2024

My book reviews are at https://github.com/stucooper/booksiveread