EMOJI-NATION

How did emojis conquer the world? "Think big, start small." Probably that’s what they would say if they could talk. So we asked their creators: from Shigetaka Kurita, designer of the first emojis, to Rayouf Alhumedhi, who created the hijab emoji. 🧕.

You couldn't let emoji roam the web unfettered and out of control. After many iterations they are now encoded in the Unicode standard. And, for better or for worse, the fate of the little yellow men is now under the purview of the Unicode Consortium, an organisation based in Silicon Valley.

Friendly and innocent, almost anything and everything can be said with emojis. To decipher this pop esperanto, Pierre Halté, doctor of Language Science and Evgeny Morozov, writer and researcher, track down the influence of these small pictograms on our language and our culture. 🕵️.