Emojis are a response to real world events

The argument

The claim that emojis have changed the world gets the direction of causation backwards, on this argument. Emojis are not introduced at random or according to the inclinations of designers; they are added because they are judged relevant to global populations, which means the decision to create one always follows something in the world that makes it worth having. That makes the set of available emojis entirely context-dependent. It is intended to reflect the world people already live in rather than to influence or lead it, and a vocabulary assembled on that principle is a record of events rather than a cause of them. The clearest illustration is the change the Unicode Consortium made in 2015. Until then the human emojis shared a single homogenous yellow skin tone, a default widely criticised as white-washed. The Consortium moved away from it by introducing an additional five skin shades, diversifying the range so that the characters could be more racially inclusive of the people using them. The result was a genuine improvement, and it is often cited as evidence of the influence emojis carry. But the timing is what matters to this argument. The change did not originate with the Consortium and then reshape attitudes; it came as a response to growing movements pressing for action against racism, and other forms of discrimination, within the technology industry. The pressure existed first and was directed at tech, and the emoji set was revised to catch up with it. Had those movements not already been making that demand, the five additional shades would not have arrived when they did. What looks like emojis changing the world turns out on inspection to be the world changing emojis. Because emojis are a response to real-world events rather than a driver of them, this argument concludes, their impact is exaggerated.

Context

New emojis are introduced into Unicode every year. These are decided by the Unicode Consortium, which selects new images based on relevance to a global audience.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Emojis may reflect trends in attitudes, but in popularising these they serve a much broader purpose. They popularise and spread these changing cultural attitudes by virtue of being so widely used.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P2] Emoji selection is based on far more than world events. For example, it is also based on data around use of existing emojis and how people are using them.