[SPEAKER_00]: Hello, hello.

[SPEAKER_00]: I can't start the episode like that.

[SPEAKER_00]: No.

[SPEAKER_00]: My aura will plummet.

[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.

[SPEAKER_00]: Hello.

[SPEAKER_00]: Hello.

[SPEAKER_00]: We are together for the first time in over a year and we're making it everyone's business.

[SPEAKER_00]: Like no one really gives a fuck except for those who have a parasolial relationship with us, which is probably a few of you.

[SPEAKER_00]: But you're lucky today.

[SPEAKER_00]: If you're lucky [SPEAKER_01]: When I saw my year yesterday, I kind of had to look away and then look back and just like taking the fact that it was her because it was quite surreal.

[SPEAKER_00]: We didn't recognize each other and then Hannah waited outside a cafe for me to get there so that we could scream as loud as we wanted to.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, my youth is disturbing others.

[SPEAKER_01]: My year is five inches taller than me, but she fell into my arms.

[SPEAKER_01]: Like, I felt like if only I could lift her up right now.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, in my hope with that action was that you would lift me all the time.

[SPEAKER_00]: Like, you know, there's only someone you can do with a tiny girl.

[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I just let you collapse, it happened to me.

[SPEAKER_01]: And like, it was beautiful.

[SPEAKER_00]: It was beautiful.

[SPEAKER_00]: And the sunset came out and that was stunning.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, like wow, this is magical.

[SPEAKER_00]: Then we took a photo booth photo together.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, we got cocktails, I would have a favorite bar.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: It was the most A.B.

[SPEAKER_01]: Rollerstone.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: Forget about that part.

[SPEAKER_01]: Mm-hmm.

[SPEAKER_01]: But no, absolutely crazy vibes.

[SPEAKER_01]: I feel like I wonder how this will translate into the recording.

[SPEAKER_01]: The frenetic energy in the room.

[SPEAKER_00]: Of our reunion.

[SPEAKER_01]: Of our...

Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: Of our physical.

[SPEAKER_00]: We're like, looking each other in the eyes right now.

[SPEAKER_00]: This is, I'm gonna kiss.

[SPEAKER_00]: So, I thought, I was on a date yesterday because Hannah and I, I mean, we lived together when we, yeah, Toronto.

[SPEAKER_00]: So it was kind of like, oh, you're here.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: But then it was like meeting up for coffee somewhere felt so wrong.

[SPEAKER_01]: It felt really weird because it's behavior for a category of friend that we've transcended for each other.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: That, like, I was like, what are we catching up about?

[SPEAKER_01]: Like, we can't really catch up because we feel like we've already been catching up.

[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks to the podcast, really.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, we're in constant communication.

[SPEAKER_01]: But it was more like I felt like I had to visit like adjust to like having you there.

[SPEAKER_01]: It was so weird.

[SPEAKER_00]: I thought I looked different.

[SPEAKER_00]: I'm, I fear it meant that she said I got a glier.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.

[SPEAKER_01]: And she's so good at reading.

[SPEAKER_01]: Between the lines, this one.

[SPEAKER_00]: Hannah's even more beautiful than the last time I saw her.

[SPEAKER_01]: Oh my god.

[SPEAKER_01]: Oh my god.

[SPEAKER_01]: Oh my god.

[SPEAKER_01]: Is this so nauseating for everybody listening?

[SPEAKER_01]: No, I bet they love it.

[SPEAKER_01]: I bet they're old.

[SPEAKER_01]: You fakes!

[SPEAKER_01]: I feel like other people's really close friendships though is like something that is so interesting to the two people in the friendship and like so annoying and like uninteresting to everybody else We've decided to subtract an entire public to it [SPEAKER_01]: I know a problem with the problem is that we've let a couple people have a Paris social connection to this friendship and it's only made the annoying part of it grow stronger.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it was um, it's not meant to be this way.

[SPEAKER_00]: This podcast could really make a breaker friendship.

[SPEAKER_00]: But the moment it's making it, so that's nice.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, you know.

[SPEAKER_00]: But just you wait.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's nice to be back in Toronto.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's weird that we're both here because like basically we've missed each other whenever we visited the other is not here So it's like whenever I'm back in Toronto, Hannah's in London and it doesn't feel fully like Toronto Yeah, and now it just feels like everything's happening all at once everyone's here.

[SPEAKER_00]: We're all ready to party [SPEAKER_01]: It's Christmas time.

[SPEAKER_01]: Christmas time.

[SPEAKER_01]: I feel like I'm on free-basing friendship right now.

[SPEAKER_01]: Like I'm seeing all the people I love.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's like a span of a week.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's like, yeah, it's all at once.

[SPEAKER_00]: Overwhelming.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's stimulating.

[SPEAKER_00]: My body is buzzing.

[SPEAKER_00]: I love my parents were like, it's like they don't really mind that I'm not seeing them that much They're like, oh, you see, hey, that's nice.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah, go buzz on love someone else That's all for you Yeah, it's awesome.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's safe.

[SPEAKER_00]: We're gonna knit together too.

[SPEAKER_00]: Well, we're here.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah We both like invented projects for ourselves so that we can knit together.

[SPEAKER_01]: I brought you on home yesterday My parents like you're gonna knit something before Christmas.

[SPEAKER_01]: They're like are you knitting as presents again?

[SPEAKER_01]: No, this is your other safe.

[SPEAKER_01]: There's it.

[SPEAKER_01]: And it's always making DIY presents.

[SPEAKER_01]: Like one year, someone has to get like a handmade gift.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's like, who's going to present this?

[SPEAKER_00]: We're not doing gifts, right?

[SPEAKER_00]: Do we figure that out?

[SPEAKER_00]: Oh.

[SPEAKER_00]: I had a pain to be a master for you.

[SPEAKER_01]: No, it's really big.

[SPEAKER_01]: No, my year asked me to make her gift and then I did it.

[SPEAKER_01]: That's okay.

[SPEAKER_01]: I didn't get you anything for your birthday, so.

[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, my fag is equal.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: For your birthday back in May.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's all right.

[SPEAKER_00]: Rob Reiner?

[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, yeah, massive switch-up of vibes, but Rob Reiner was allegedly murdered by his own son.

[SPEAKER_00]: He and his wife, as I'm sure many of you have heard.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I don't know, I do get affected by celebrity deaths, but this one, I don't know.

[SPEAKER_00]: There's something that just feels so profoundly horrific about it.

[SPEAKER_00]: It feels just like such a herrificly violent and just such a wholesome and beautiful life.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I feel like I'm filled with anger, it is very personal that I feel extremely angry.

[SPEAKER_01]: I don't even think it's very social because I think that Rob Reiner is one of those directors who's filmography.

[SPEAKER_01]: At least one of his films has probably had like a very significant place in the memories and like history of like families.

[SPEAKER_00]: around our generation because of like, you know, the time he was making his film Yeah, he just was the most like quintessentially hollywood director and I mean that in the best way possible Like he was making the great American film over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again And like different genres and it's just insane to me I also grew up watching my grandma really liked all in the family [SPEAKER_00]: I don't know why I could, I used to call it Archie Bunker, like I didn't know the name of the show, but she really liked meethead and Rob Reiner obviously played him and I don't know he just had such a beautiful role in the world of pop culture in the world of filmmaking and I actually watched when Harry Metzalli a couple nights before he passed away and it was probably like the 40th fucking time out.

[SPEAKER_00]: Watched it and every single time like yeah, you're always worried that you're going to kind of ruin and move you for yourself You keep watching it, but it's just every single time you get some sort of new emotional fulfillment out of it.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that movie destroys me.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it like in the best way It's just fucking beautiful like you just knew how to make the perfect movie [SPEAKER_01]: I think what's interesting about Harry Metcelli is that in the way we talk about it, it's so closely tied to Nora Afron and her legacy.

[SPEAKER_01]: I think perhaps because it's also part of this sort of trilogy of collaborations with Meg Ryan, that maybe we don't first associate it with Rob Rainer.

[SPEAKER_00]: We don't give up enough credit for his influence over the movie, which is massive.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: So essentially, and this is why I'm just really [SPEAKER_00]: I don't know if I can watch it for a long time, because the ending is about his relationship to Michelle Reiner, who was also obviously killed, and he ends up changing the ending.

[SPEAKER_00]: And if we talk about this in, we did a video about this last February, about rom-coms, like doing the research about when Harry McSally made me realize just how incredibly sophisticated this movie is.

[SPEAKER_00]: But he ended up changing the ending it was supposed to be a bit more like a cynical end and he because he met Michelle while they were filming He felt compelled to change it because he had this like newfound belief in love He's made movies with some of the most iconic lines in film history Billy Crystal saying when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with someone you want to rest of your life to start right [SPEAKER_01]: I can't hear that without crying, like I think it is so like because these feels you believe it.

[SPEAKER_01]: And you watch a lot of rom-coms where people make grand statements like that and there's a lot of sentiment being thrown around and it kind of just feels like it's all part of, I don't know, it all melts into each other, it doesn't really like hit you, it's really rare for something that kind of now cliche feeling of like a plot point, which I know [SPEAKER_01]: is thanks to the popularity of when Harry Metcelli that this sort of became more of a cliche.

[SPEAKER_01]: But it's like rare when you see something like that and you believe it, I've seen so many other rom-coms before this.

[SPEAKER_01]: This is the first time I really, really believed it.

[SPEAKER_01]: And I think it's because, yeah, the truth behind it.

[SPEAKER_00]: Behind it.

[SPEAKER_00]: This was someone's actual expression of their feelings.

[SPEAKER_00]: And like all accounts of everyone who knew them, they sounded like a beautiful couple, like two beautiful individuals.

[SPEAKER_00]: coming together to make beautiful things and enrich each other's lives and yeah it just breeds so much more important than to win Harry Metzalli and it's just incomprehensible to me that both those lives were extinguished and yeah it's just like unbathomably sad.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: I understand wanting to not watch his films for a bit because it is so tragic.

[SPEAKER_01]: But I feel like, you know, especially this time of year, I feel like when I really want to go revisit a lot of times.

[SPEAKER_00]: A lot of them?

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, a few good men you should see it.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I haven't seen that one.

[SPEAKER_00]: Incredible.

[SPEAKER_00]: I just can't believe the breadth of his work.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's like insane.

[SPEAKER_01]: The Princess bride haven't seen since I was a kid.

[SPEAKER_00]: Oh my god, perfect movie.

[SPEAKER_00]: Like he just made perfect movies.

[SPEAKER_00]: Hit after hit he was an amazing person.

[SPEAKER_00]: It sounded like generally was extremely progressive in his worldviews and championed progressive causes and yeah He never be forgotten truly the Michel so this is our final episode of the season and it's a goofy one [SPEAKER_01]: It's goofy, it's um, boss I have here.

[SPEAKER_01]: I was working on this episode while I was battling the most extreme in so many I've ever, I've never had in so many I like this in my life, probably running on like no sleep.

[SPEAKER_01]: So I really tried to make a silly topic.

[SPEAKER_01]: feel intellectual and I think I think she succeeded.

[SPEAKER_01]: Oh well, that's very, you all have to be the judge of that.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's like a beautiful fever dream.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's not an episode.

[SPEAKER_01]: With that, I'm Hannah and I'm Maya and this is Rehash, a podcast about the internet phenomena that strike a nerve in our culture only to be quickly forgotten but we think are due for a revisiting.

[SPEAKER_01]: This season is about communication on the internet.

[SPEAKER_01]: Online, we may have shot the shit, but have we also shot the messenger?

[SPEAKER_01]: If you like our show and you want to hear more from us, you can support us on Patreon at patreon.com slash.

[SPEAKER_01]: rehash podcasts where we have bonus episodes and early access to our regular programming.

[SPEAKER_01]: If you don't want to join the Patreon, you can feel free to rate and review us on Spotify and Apple podcasts because that helps us out a lot.

[SPEAKER_01]: And you know what's a great belated Christmas gift?

[SPEAKER_01]: Our Patreon.

[SPEAKER_01]: Oh you forgot to get your girlfriend something for Christmas.

[SPEAKER_01]: Hey, Trion!

[SPEAKER_00]: She'll forget that it was late.

[SPEAKER_00]: She'll say, babe, thank you so much for the pain.

[SPEAKER_00]: Hey, Trion!

[SPEAKER_00]: That sounds like we're referencing something.

[SPEAKER_00]: We're not.

[SPEAKER_00]: So Hannah included our tagline in her notes for this episode.

[SPEAKER_00]: She wrote it all out in emojis, which I find really impressive.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, maybe I'll put this in the episode post on Instagram.

[SPEAKER_00]: You know, if a tree falls in the wood and no one sort of sees it happen, well we're telling you now that it did happen.

[SPEAKER_01]: It did happen.

[SPEAKER_01]: It did happen.

[SPEAKER_01]: And it's, I think, pretty good.

[SPEAKER_01]: I think so too.

[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you so much.

[SPEAKER_01]: So in 1851, [SPEAKER_01]: Herman Mellville published Moby Dick.

[SPEAKER_01]: Though it was not appreciated in Mellville's lifetime, the book would be reappraised in the early 20th century and subsequently canonized as a great American novel.

[SPEAKER_01]: By 2009, Moby Dick had long been considered a classic, one taught widely in schools and whose themes and plot have permeated popular culture.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so, just as its legacy had evolved at the last turn of the century, by 2009, the novel was ready to be revisited again.

[SPEAKER_01]: So, Maya, I'm going to send you a few passages to read.

[SPEAKER_00]: Phone, man, boat, whale, okay hand design.

[SPEAKER_00]: To translate, call me Ishmael.

[SPEAKER_00]: This is so intellectual.

[SPEAKER_00]: slot machine, the emoji that is like the Japanese sign for here, small boat.

[SPEAKER_01]: To translate, some years ago, never mind how long precisely, having little or no money in my purse and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.

[SPEAKER_00]: The number five, the X sign, nose, and emoji to symbolize the Yen rising.

[SPEAKER_00]: Question mark, our muscle flower.

[SPEAKER_00]: To translate, it is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation.

[SPEAKER_00]: city-scape, ex-sign, hat, sunrise.

[SPEAKER_01]: To translate, whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth, whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul, whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before a coffin warehouses, [SPEAKER_01]: and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet.

[SPEAKER_01]: And especially, whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street and methodically knocking people's hats off.

[SPEAKER_01]: Then, I account at high time to get to see as soon as I can.

[SPEAKER_01]: So these are the opening lines of emoji dick.

[SPEAKER_01]: A complete translation of the classic novel composed entirely of emojis.

[SPEAKER_01]: That's really impressive.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, emoji dick is the brainchild of a man named Fred Benson.

[SPEAKER_01]: In 2009, he used funds he raised on Kickstarter to pay 800 people on Amazon Mechanical Turk, which is like this marketplace for hiring people to do human intelligence tasks.

[SPEAKER_01]: online.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's like a crowd-sourcing thing.

[SPEAKER_01]: So he got 800 people to participate in this project, where he'd assign workers a sentence from the novel, and then they'd have to translate it, and then there'd be this other team of people who would vote on the translations, and that's how they sort of figured out what each sentence should be essentially.

[SPEAKER_00]: That's so impressive, because this would be before the time that you could, because this is quite a recent iOS update, I think that you can search an emoji like in the emoji box, [SPEAKER_01]: not only that, but so this is 2009 and, you know, not unlike its source material, a moji dick was actually very ahead of its time.

[SPEAKER_01]: Really?

[SPEAKER_01]: Because in order to explain this, I'm going to give you like a brief history of the emoji leading up to this point, the word emoji comes from the Japanese words E for picture and emoji for character slash letter.

[SPEAKER_01]: That's how you pronounce the words at least.

[SPEAKER_01]: It weirdly resembles the word emoticon, which is the word we used for little smiley faces, which is a mixture of emotion and icon.

[SPEAKER_01]: But they're not actually related.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's kind of funny.

[SPEAKER_01]: The words are quite different.

[SPEAKER_01]: Wow, yeah, that's interesting.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so the clearest origin of the emojis we have today come from this Japanese designer named [SPEAKER_01]: Shigitaka Kurita had been working for a major Japanese cell phone carrier when he designed a series of like Pixel cartoon symbols in 1999 as a fun new addition for like a new phone release.

[SPEAKER_01]: Ooh, I like these that broken heart emoji is really cool.

[SPEAKER_01]: So, yeah, they're like pixelated, single-color icons basically.

[SPEAKER_00]: I like these way more.

[SPEAKER_00]: I know, they kind of look like something you'd see on a game boy.

[SPEAKER_00]: The headphone icons really sexy too.

[SPEAKER_00]: Let's run it back, but honestly, I'm probably just in a cell to brain.

[SPEAKER_00]: Do you know that little disease that pops up in your brain now?

[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, yeah, I have it, and it's your turn.

[SPEAKER_01]: I love that, it's just ugly.

[SPEAKER_01]: So after this release, competing cell phone companies in Japan began to try and jump on the emoji train.

[SPEAKER_01]: They started developing more and more complex versions of emojis, adding new ones to their libraries.

[SPEAKER_01]: But because these were competing businesses, [SPEAKER_01]: There wasn't like any universality to the emojis, so I might send you a hat emoji and it might show up as like a dog or like a music note or something on your phone if you had a different type of film from it.

[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.

[SPEAKER_00]: Well, we just come up as like a completely different emoji.

[SPEAKER_01]: It could be, yeah, like it could at times there was no standardization, right, because they were like in an arm's very space, basically, to like have the best emoji.

[SPEAKER_01]: Wow.

[SPEAKER_01]: That's cool.

[SPEAKER_01]: And then this changed in 2006 when a little company called Google teamed up with one of these Japanese phone companies in an attempt to popularize Gmail in Japan.

[SPEAKER_01]: Basically, they made this emoji keyboard available to their users, but because they wanted Gmail to be accessible to anybody with any phone that could access the internet, they had to have a standard keyboard.

[SPEAKER_01]: It couldn't be this situation where we're sending things that turn up different.

[SPEAKER_01]: So they assembled a team that was basically dedicated to implementing this standardized set of emojis into Unicode.

[SPEAKER_01]: And Unicode is basically like the universal standard of encoding computer characters.

[SPEAKER_01]: So if it doesn't matter if you want to mac or a PC, you'd be seeing the same font of T or something on a website.

[SPEAKER_01]: They're usually working within the letters and the alphabet and the numeric systems that like, [SPEAKER_01]: we're already established, but now suddenly they had to kind of put this team together to embed what has gone on to become like the standard set of emojis.

[SPEAKER_01]: So when the iPhone was invented, a keyboard of these Unicode emojis was included, but it was only in Japan, but a few kind of smart people outside of Japan realized that they could download Japanese language apps, [SPEAKER_01]: And then they could have access to the emoji keyboard.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's so fascinating the pipeline between like it's like Japanese people innovating and then like people who were kind of on the cutting edge in Western society But still behind Japan catching on early to Japan like I feel like that happens in so many different ways especially with like fashion and stuff like that Tell it or it's like it'll be people who are kind of cool here or in the know or like hip to the know but it's always still behind Japan in some way [SPEAKER_01]: I also think a lot of technologies that first became popular with youth and like became bigger in youth culture and then became more mainstream.

[SPEAKER_01]: Like even if we think about the camera phone which also started off as like a thing in Japan in the late 90s and then eventually came over to the US.

[SPEAKER_01]: I think it's something interesting about like youth especially having their [SPEAKER_01]: fingers on that pulse.

[SPEAKER_00]: Well yeah, it's like what we talked about in our weebs episode with the otaku and like mongons stuff like that and then like western otaku.

[SPEAKER_01]: So it's interesting that you bring up manga because a lot of the early designs for the facial expression emojis were really influenced by manga because with manga there's this almost like standard eyes set of emotive spaces that are used regardless of who's like drawing it or writing it like you know what I have a question someone face looks like there's like the cutesy little blushing phase [SPEAKER_01]: There is like, you know, tears coming out of your eyes, face like there's all of these kind of science.

[SPEAKER_00]: Like they had the kind of emoji with the two streaks of tears running down is so long.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, exactly.

[SPEAKER_01]: The exes of your eyes kind of things were really eyes so yeah, Manga played a huge influence on like the design of the emoji.

[SPEAKER_01]: So, when Fred Benson was making emoji dick, this was 2009, and emojis actually hadn't become accessible to people outside of Japan yet, so like you were saying, [SPEAKER_01]: before like this actually was really cutting edge because it wasn't even like a technology that had become sort of available.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, available and I think it wasn't like someone was looking at something that we were all doing and trying to think of like a new way to utilize it.

[SPEAKER_01]: It was like before it even officially really been introduced.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so like I read an interview with him in the New Yorker and they refer to emojis as these like little Japanese like cartoon symbols basically because there wasn't really a frame of reference for them yet that name didn't mean anything and so in that interview with the New Yorker Benson said I'm interested in the phenomenon of how our language, communications and culture are influenced by digital technology.

[SPEAKER_01]: emoji or either a low point or a high point in that story.

[SPEAKER_01]: So I felt I could confront a lot of our shared anxieties about the future of human expression by forcing a great work of literature through such a strange new filter.

[SPEAKER_01]: And Moby Dick ultimately was only chosen because it was available.

[SPEAKER_01]: public domain through the Gutenberg project, but he then went on to sort of explain that Moby Dick then felt like this metaphor for people taking on this like very overwhelming task, you know never read it.

[SPEAKER_00]: The white whale.

[SPEAKER_01]: I've never read a non-emoji version.

[SPEAKER_00]: I also haven't read Moby Dick.

[SPEAKER_00]: I wasn't really like a signed is it popular in American curriculum?

[SPEAKER_01]: I think it is, but I almost feel like maybe not as much anymore.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's a large book, like I think it's a pretty thick book to assign a bunch of teenagers.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's like 600 pages.

[SPEAKER_01]: Hmm, I feel like they'd still do it, but yeah, but they were always giving us like the great gotts Be, catchin' the rye, like skinny little things.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I guess so.

[SPEAKER_00]: I was too busy reading Miriam Toes, a complicated kindness, because I'm Canadian.

[SPEAKER_00]: I read half of that, because I was a bad student.

[SPEAKER_00]: I didn't like it, because I had no punctuation.

[SPEAKER_00]: And that pissed me off, even though I'm like, that's kind of cool.

[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, bird had no quotations.

[SPEAKER_01]: So six years after emoji tick, the Oxford dictionary named this as its word of the year.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's the cry laughing emoji!

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah!

[SPEAKER_01]: Great reward bits.

[SPEAKER_01]: So other contenders from that year included Brexit, Dark Web, Lumber sexual, on-fleet, sharing economy, refugee, and they, because they [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and refugee I love that on fleek and refugee are in the same.

[SPEAKER_01]: I like the back and forth between the political and the fucking stupid.

[SPEAKER_00]: I'm a political, I mean, yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, awesome.

[SPEAKER_01]: But apparently more than Brexit, more than refugee, more than on fleek, the cry laughing emoji was the most significant.

[SPEAKER_00]: That's a weird to me.

[SPEAKER_00]: Didn't feel like it had any significance that year.

[SPEAKER_00]: Or like any, I feel like cry-loving emoji, what?

[SPEAKER_01]: It actually was the most popularly used emoji from that year.

[SPEAKER_01]: At least in Great Britain and the US.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I think I guess it became kind of cringe because boomers started using, and we've talked about this in an episode before.

[SPEAKER_00]: Boomers started using that sideways, like mean laughing emoji, you know the one where it's like cross-eyed, but it's kind of diagonal, and it's cry-loving.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: And it just feels mean spirited and like boomer-esque.

[SPEAKER_00]: But I feel like the cry-lap emoji got kind of like obsolete for a little bit and now it's coming back in a big way.

[SPEAKER_01]: I think though we take ourselves back 10 years, this is like still vine.

[SPEAKER_01]: Well, that's what I'm saying, yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: I did die soon after this.

[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe because when they made this the word of the year, it became gross.

[SPEAKER_01]: I think someone had pointed out that the crylaph emoji might have actually been in the caption for the original vine that on fleek came from.

[SPEAKER_01]: So it was like so embedded in all of that.

[SPEAKER_01]: You know what?

[SPEAKER_00]: I'm ready to bring back on fleek and also lit.

[SPEAKER_01]: on fleek but our eyebrows on fleek anymore.

[SPEAKER_01]: They're not.

[SPEAKER_01]: They're terrible.

[SPEAKER_01]: They don't exist.

[SPEAKER_00]: Exactly.

[SPEAKER_01]: They're emaciated.

[SPEAKER_00]: That's, you know, it's all on fleek.

[SPEAKER_00]: No, that's it's not fleek.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's not.

[SPEAKER_01]: No, on fleek needs to have a bit more dimension.

[SPEAKER_00]: Do you have a now?

[SPEAKER_00]: We have like micro and needle like we have like um micro and needleing for eyebrows in a way that wait, right, is that what it's called?

[SPEAKER_00]: Sure.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think so.

[SPEAKER_00]: Anyway, it's ready.

[SPEAKER_00]: You can have those people just have fake eyebrows now.

[SPEAKER_00]: So I don't, it's hard to say on fleek because I'm like [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, the fake eyebrow.

[SPEAKER_01]: Actually someone in like the year 2022 or something told me my eyebrows were on fleek Honestly, I mean, you really locked that in.

[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I I was just like I felt an Acronistic wouldn't insane compliment to get in this year of our world 2022.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah, but I'm down to bring back lit though.

[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, I say lit and I say fire.

[SPEAKER_00]: I said you do I Like fire.

[SPEAKER_00]: I like fire.

[SPEAKER_00]: I like fire lit.

[SPEAKER_00]: I have not come back yet But you're cutting edge.

[SPEAKER_00]: That's really I I wonder if they brought it back in Japan [SPEAKER_01]: Actually, over in the UK, everyone's saying, let bibles.

[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe they're behind.

[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe they're like six years behind.

[SPEAKER_00]: I remember saying, Libby, when I was in Montreal, my friends really crediting me with bringing that in and now I'm so embarrassed.

[SPEAKER_01]: No, that was a word I actually really associate with you in your memory.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's really beautiful.

[SPEAKER_00]: And you're like, I see.

[SPEAKER_00]: You write it on your tunes.

[SPEAKER_00]: I looked through like, you know, when you just bored and you go through old photos on your grid, like, like, archived ones?

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: And like, all the comments were always like, Libby, this is a lit girl.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: Remember getting turned?

[SPEAKER_00]: Getting turned.

[SPEAKER_00]: Also, Uber everywhere.

[SPEAKER_00]: I feel like I brought up the two different Uber everywhere.

[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know if I know if I know if I'm everywhere.

[SPEAKER_00]: Do you think Bay will ever come back?

[SPEAKER_00]: It never left for me.

[SPEAKER_00]: You say Bay?

[SPEAKER_00]: If you have a bay and you want to call them Bay, you say Bay.

[SPEAKER_00]: That's Bay.

[SPEAKER_00]: I love that's Bay.

[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, so there's Made in Tio.

[SPEAKER_00]: I skipped fast the whole chorus, wait, there was one Uber everywhere, and then there was another Uber everywhere.

[SPEAKER_00]: There were two Uber everywhere, and it was like all we talked about at the time and then they were around children, they were cool, but I can't find the other one, I swear there were two different songs, made by two different people called Uber everywhere, but I could be completely wrong.

[SPEAKER_00]: Anyways, I feel really like scrambled now, and I don't understand, but anyways, Uber everywhere was a big one, I feel like we set that a lot back then.

[SPEAKER_01]: Take me back.

[SPEAKER_01]: Take me back to 2016, yeah?

[SPEAKER_01]: That's speaking of.

[SPEAKER_01]: So in 2015, the president of Oxford Dictionaries explained this decision of the cry laugh emoji to the guardian.

[SPEAKER_01]: And he said, we just thought, when you look back at the year in language.

[SPEAKER_01]: One of the most striking things was that, in terms of written communication, the most ascendant aspect of it wasn't awarded all, it was emoji culture.

[SPEAKER_01]: And here's some of my evidence for that.

[SPEAKER_01]: In the year 2015, the emoji movie was announced big Hollywood success for the emoji.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's mainstream, baby.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, a teenage boy in New York was arrested for tweeting a copper emoji followed by a bunch of gun emojis.

[SPEAKER_01]: Seriously.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so emo- the What cops have guns?

[SPEAKER_01]: Like, I can't mean anything.

[SPEAKER_01]: But no, it was like, it was a cop with the three guns point at that point.

[SPEAKER_01]: That's it.

[SPEAKER_01]: Ah, the cop, okay.

[SPEAKER_01]: This also started this conversation about how...

What is even the charge you could have arrested someone on that?

[SPEAKER_01]: So he ended up having the charges dropped, but he wasn't initially arrested because it could be taken as threatening the police.

[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, but then like school shooters, you'll be out here on YouTube making comments like, I'm gonna kill everyone in my class of this school, and then they only discover that, like, after the facts?

[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I'm just, you know.

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, no, you're not wrong, baby.

[SPEAKER_01]: I think obviously the fact that it was targeting a cop, there's gonna be a bit more attention on there, but also around this time all these questions came up about how to address emojis in the courtroom and like how seriously to take them as a form of speech [SPEAKER_01]: what kind of like context did they add to people's text messages that were being reviewed as evidence for tone, like what did the emoji contribute to that?

[SPEAKER_01]: And so this was sort of a funny period where people were trying to figure out like how much depth to give them.

[SPEAKER_01]: Also, that year Hillary Clinton tweeted, how does your student loan debt make you feel?

[SPEAKER_01]: Tell us in three emojis or less.

[SPEAKER_00]: I felt like it was mentally preparing my body to be.

[SPEAKER_00]: For Hillary.

[SPEAKER_00]: She would say, like, my, I was not ready still.

[SPEAKER_00]: And my, as someone with student loan debt, how would it give me three emojis?

[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I'm Canadian so I have the tongue out when I open a motory like that's one of them Then I have a little bit of fatigued face like the salty looking in the corner face because like I still don't like when did they take money out of my account No, and then maybe like the baby face because I'm like, please, please don't charge me into a [SPEAKER_00]: But honestly like I don't know Canada.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's not that much money.

[SPEAKER_01]: So yeah again the scheme of things Yes, that's true.

[SPEAKER_01]: So you could add a little maple leaf and Luigi and like Bird face maybe.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, sorry the went to school.

[SPEAKER_00]: She went to make it.

[SPEAKER_00]: There's only so many emojis.

[SPEAKER_00]: I can joke shut There's like so many emojis like I think I can put in here.

[SPEAKER_00]: That's I have all can I have 10 kind of extension [SPEAKER_01]: I'm going to have to take that up with Hillary.

[SPEAKER_01]: This is also the year that Kim Kardashian and all these other celebrities launched their own custom emoji keyboards.

[SPEAKER_01]: Like do you remember Kim emoji?

[SPEAKER_01]: It's just like a bunch of butts.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so Elgore released one, which I'm like baby.

[SPEAKER_00]: Was it like a star and I like a falton or a star?

[SPEAKER_01]: and I can give us like a little cartoon and so I'll go at faces, like, do when things.

[SPEAKER_01]: But I just kind of thinking about a time where I'll go at felt culturally relevant enough to be the subject of an emoji keyboard at the different time.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's different time, yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: Was I a story by Steven Spielberg though?

[SPEAKER_00]: Really good.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, good movie, really good.

[SPEAKER_01]: Good movie.

[SPEAKER_01]: I think that man's got a future ahead of him that Steven Spielberg.

[SPEAKER_01]: He's got chops, I kid.

[SPEAKER_01]: kill myself.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's like a letter box, but you sound like a letter box, top of you.

[SPEAKER_01]: This is Stephen Fellow.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's got a bright career.

[SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, the Oxford dictionary said, the emoji best reflected the ethos mood and preoccupations of 2015.

[SPEAKER_00]: Looking back at this time, we've just gone down memory lane.

[SPEAKER_00]: Do you agree?

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I could see how this was a time where like the internet started to take on a more visual culture.

[SPEAKER_00]: Like, it had already been leading up to that anyways, but I do feel like the visuals of the internet became more sophisticated maybe around this time, a little bit more easy to use.

[SPEAKER_00]: I felt like a bit more natural.

[SPEAKER_00]: I could see it being a more transitional period between the kind of more buggy days of the internet to now and [SPEAKER_00]: So yeah, I can see that catching on to visual culture.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think there was more of a demand also for this idea of like reaction, like once the emoji sort of permeated like the culture in that way, you started getting, you know, Facebook adapting from just the like button to the heart, the thumbs down, the like smiley face, like you started getting all of these options, and now you can like [SPEAKER_01]: react to anything.

[SPEAKER_01]: So the Oxford dictionary is accepting an emoji as their word of the year did raise a lot of questions about the linguistic potential of emojis.

[SPEAKER_01]: Because when you think about it, emojis are these visual symbols that are meant to represent specific words or concepts.

[SPEAKER_01]: And like, there are some where if you paired them together, they can express even more complex ideas.

[SPEAKER_01]: This kind of led some to argue that they could maybe function as their own language.

[SPEAKER_01]: Almost like this modern iteration of hieroglyphics and other pictographic languages.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, we're definitely seeing the death of text or like the written word.

[SPEAKER_01]: And there was a lot of fear about that, but a lot of sort of excitement about what this represented.

[SPEAKER_00]: It does feel a bit to me, like, in one way it is cool that it's like a return to hybrid life experience, but then another, like, it feels like the U.S.

getting rid of like the use in color because they wanted to save money on typing.

[SPEAKER_00]: You know, totally.

[SPEAKER_00]: Like, just trying to condense thoughts into as little as possible because it's just like easier.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's like more convenient.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: So, yeah, I don't know.

[SPEAKER_01]: What can you think of maybe some benefits of having a tool like this from a communication perspective of having these symbols instead of words?

[SPEAKER_00]: Well, it's cross-cultural.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's stretches across language or like obliterates barriers to communication.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: Exactly.

[SPEAKER_01]: We don't really actually have people who have tried throughout history to implement universal languages.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's nothing as successful as opposed as the emoji as a way of it.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, be able to communicate with someone that coming face emojis, just that's just, you know, everyone understands that.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: Well, actually, I know people use that many different ways actually.

[SPEAKER_01]: Well, when we'll get to this later, there are a lot of emojis that do not really actually cross cultural bounds.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: There you go.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, so bear with me.

[SPEAKER_01]: I want to talk about Marshall McLuhan.

[SPEAKER_01]: I'm gonna be so real with you guys.

[SPEAKER_01]: Like, I really struggle with this writing.

[SPEAKER_01]: Like, the way he writes.

[SPEAKER_01]: I know it, like, a lot of people have this experience.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's very hard to understand.

[SPEAKER_00]: Well, you're Trontoni and Hannah.

[SPEAKER_00]: I'm on.

[SPEAKER_01]: I want to prop up a Canadian icon.

[SPEAKER_01]: I really do.

[SPEAKER_01]: But I feel like the biggest idiot in the world every time I try to engage with McLuhan.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now, his writing is definitely quite...

[SPEAKER_00]: Insane.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's like a crazy person.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: Well, you can forgive a lot of other scholars because you're like, well, it's French and just a translation.

[SPEAKER_00]: But I'm a clue, and it's just Canadian.

[SPEAKER_01]: I'm just like, so...

No, it's not like difficult.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's how I feel a bit like Donald Harroway.

[SPEAKER_00]: I really have trouble reading here, so I'm like, you're like, Julia Kristiva.

[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, my god.

[SPEAKER_00]: That also, I couldn't even...

[SPEAKER_00]: I couldn't enjoy the idea.

[SPEAKER_00]: I tried.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it came to be difficult for sure.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, basically, like a big dumb dumb, but maybe, you know, you have a master's in communication.

[SPEAKER_01]: So, she does, she does, she does, but meanwhile, I read the medium is the message in first year, and I really thought I understood it, and then answered a question about it in my tutorial, and the TA was like, um, that's completely wrong.

[SPEAKER_01]: Uh, what did you say it was?

[SPEAKER_01]: I can't remember, but it was like, I think I just didn't realize [SPEAKER_01]: how literal that expression was, like the medium being the message, and so I was because his writing is so out there, and he kind of writes like really flowery flowery flowery flowery Yeah, that I kind of thought that it couldn't be that literal.

[SPEAKER_01]: It is very literal.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, the medium is the message.

[SPEAKER_00]: Do you want to explain that It's simply just the idea that the form is more important than the content in the stage.

[SPEAKER_00]: So the means with which we are communicating [SPEAKER_00]: has greater it shapes our culture more than the better.

[SPEAKER_00]: It has a greater impact on the way our culture evolves or operates than the actual thing that like what is actually being said within those forms.

[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you.

[SPEAKER_00]: Or think about like not the painting but the frame.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.

[SPEAKER_01]: Well exactly.

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean so it's the clue in was writing during what you called the print age, which was an era of [SPEAKER_01]: It's a time where a society was largely shaped by the dominance of written-in printed communication.

[SPEAKER_01]: It was a literacy-based society, and he believed that literacy-based culture was one of fragmentation and nationalism and individualism.

[SPEAKER_01]: because of kind of, I guess the requirements of like reading texts and engaging with it in that way.

[SPEAKER_00]: It lends more easily to interpretation.

[SPEAKER_00]: I think the individual's interpretation.

[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, and this is kind of one of the great fears of like the Frankfurt scholars was that this visual culture can way more easily manipulate the masses.

[SPEAKER_00]: They were like really wary of film, for example, as a medium.

[SPEAKER_00]: Whereas like, you know, people sitting around their breakfast people and reading the like a news article from a newspaper has a really different effect on the person.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, exactly.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so McClue and kind of with the invention of the television, he anticipated that there would be a follow-up to this print age that he called the global village where there would be this return to audio tactile forms of communication, where it's [SPEAKER_01]: in a sense, like returning back to moral traditions and the cultures that were based around that, but also bringing in this new form of maybe like non-linear means of sharing information.

[SPEAKER_01]: I guess less connected to the idea of like sentence structure and like reading things out on a page and more.

[SPEAKER_01]: And also importantly like technology like the television and later the computer allows you to also reach people on this global scale kind of uniting us.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so a lot of the nerds who helped create the internet as we know it had like a really strong devotion to McLuhanism.

[SPEAKER_01]: They kind of took this idea of the global village and put their techno utopian spin on it and really envisioned.

[SPEAKER_01]: the internet as a sort of manifestation of that, which brings us to the emoji.

[SPEAKER_01]: Also, if I write any of that wrong, guys, be nice to me.

[SPEAKER_01]: I was really scared to bring up a clue in.

[SPEAKER_00]: You're not afraid, said McLuhan, also.

[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you so much.

[SPEAKER_01]: So this brings us to the emoji, because I read this 2018 article from Marcelo de Nassie, where he wrote that nowhere is McCluban's assessment of the global village, more verifiable than, [SPEAKER_01]: it is in the rise of emoji writing and he continues the form of visual grammar that is not a replica of linguistic grammar with visual symbols it has its own mode of utterance organization allowing users to create coherent and meaningful sequences or combinations so basically like the emojis sort of a language in and of itself and the fact that it doesn't have like rules [SPEAKER_01]: and the fact that it's pictographic.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's pictographic and it encompasses more of like a feeling between the reader.

[SPEAKER_01]: Different parts of your brain but then like reading words, you know.

[SPEAKER_00]: Totally like I feel like there's some emojis that I find really cute that isn't necessarily their purpose.

[SPEAKER_00]: Like our friend Aiden uses a lot of um, nerd emojis, Aiden.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I find it so cute when he does it like if it changes kind of like the content of the like the the meaning of the original text, you know, exactly.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I feel like emojis can so easily inform that you can't necessarily explain why.

[SPEAKER_01]: Well, so then I was going to ask like, what do you think first of all, this point or this idea, like emojis are standing on their own as like a language, like do you buy it?

[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I'm just like, I'm a bit of a horror for the written word.

[SPEAKER_00]: So I just feel like my legions are there.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I don't necessarily buy it.

[SPEAKER_00]: I do think that there is a power in a symbol.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I think the ways that symbols can convey complex emotions.

[SPEAKER_00]: I think the way that we communicate especially over text is really fascinating.

[SPEAKER_00]: Like someone just sending LOL with the period has so much meaning behind it.

[SPEAKER_00]: But it's when you just look at it at first glance, it means nothing, you know, and I feel like an emoji can really encompass like those complicated feelings that fall that kind of like it like reading between the lines of words.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so I think that is really powerful in the emoji, but I mean, no, because I just I really believe in the power of writing and being able to construct a damn sentence and like using your words.

[SPEAKER_01]: And do you think, like, okay, for thinking in line of Cluen as a medium as the message, how do you see like the emoji and its popularization having so far influenced our age or our society?

[SPEAKER_01]: Do you think it's had like a deep impact on it?

[SPEAKER_01]: Even if maybe we've not actually replaced [SPEAKER_01]: the written word so much with it, or at least not entirely.

[SPEAKER_00]: I feel like it's created this kind of alternative means of communication that's running in tandem with the historical means of communication talking and texting and writing and whatnot.

[SPEAKER_00]: That is very powerful.

[SPEAKER_00]: I think the internet has really culminated this idea in the power of a face, the power of an image, the power of a symbol that Andy Warhol was working on in the mid-century.

[SPEAKER_00]: But yeah, I think that the emoji has a lot of power in it in this like alternative world we exist in on the internet But I don't necessarily think that it's transcended beyond the confines of the internet I don't necessarily think it has so much weight in person.

[SPEAKER_00]: I guess [SPEAKER_00]: Well, you have because it is, and it's a plan to do anything.

[SPEAKER_01]: Well, yeah, it is a digital version of, I think especially over thinking about the smiley emojis, like that set of emojis.

[SPEAKER_01]: A lot of them are digital versions of like facial expressions that we already have used for as long as we've been communicating with one another to help get our points across, right?

[SPEAKER_01]: what it's done I think more than changed the way we communicate with one another, it's just helped us further replicate the way we would communicate with each other in person onto the internet because it allows us to talk to each other in a way that doesn't rely as much on explicit intentions and meaning.

[SPEAKER_01]: Because it allows the recipient of our messages to infer.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, exactly.

[SPEAKER_01]: In a way, I mean, that's why emojis are great for flirting.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's way harder to kind of get tone across or to stay coy.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, if you were just texting someone, but coded, yeah, exactly.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, that's very coded in a way that language can't be as easily, especially over text.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, exactly.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so fallbacks of like trying to use emojis as actual replacements for language, like if you were to try to use an emoji in a literal sense, I think we are generally quite used to interpreting them either as like metaphors or codes for things, or as like embellishment, [SPEAKER_01]: that I don't think our brains are really wired yet to kind of read emojis as the entire thought or message themselves.

[SPEAKER_01]: Does that, do you get what I'm saying?

[SPEAKER_00]: No totally.

[SPEAKER_00]: I wonder if we can get to that point really at all.

[SPEAKER_01]: I think, well, in one of the articles I was reading and I feel bad, because I didn't write a note about this.

[SPEAKER_01]: I just, so I can't remember which one it was from, but someone brought up the example [SPEAKER_01]: being like it didn't really function fully as a language yet, but then a bunch of people got together and sort of started helping it develop more and to like a complex language.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I think even sign language in general is something that I think of, but I'm like, there's so much that I had an office in an expert in like a household, for example, but like, there is also so much going on with sign language and like, feels somewhat malleable in the ways that it's like delivered because it's delivered through the human body.

[SPEAKER_00]: versus like an emoji, which is static.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, but it even feels different.

[SPEAKER_01]: Like the emoji doesn't move and the the emojis are sort of divided between literal representations of things Representations of moods and then sort of things that are basically just like symbols that are already sort of part of other languages Yeah, yeah, like especially because emojis are Japanese there's a lot of Japanese symbols in there [SPEAKER_01]: Right.

[SPEAKER_00]: They're also the emojis that have taken on new life that didn't have the original me like like the eggplant for example, right eggplant Yeah, for sure Oh my god, what sorry speaking eggplant, but I was in the store the Japanese I went to this like Japanese store in New York to get my niece Who's a bit of a weeb some stuff for Christmas and look at this little figurine that was sitting in there and like I'm pretty sure this is a kid store [SPEAKER_00]: It's basically this like little Figuring.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's like a little man wearing and I don't know what this is from but he's wearing a cow costume and his face is kind of like orgasmic or he's like he looks like kind of bashful and then his ass is just sticking out and like both ass cheeks have like are like flush red as if you got spank I thought that they looks like nipples.

[SPEAKER_00]: I was like are these is it?

[SPEAKER_00]: No, he's like he's like waiting to get spanked [SPEAKER_00]: I think he did get spanked.

[SPEAKER_00]: Anyway, sorry, this is just, oh, first time I was talking about the eggplant emoji, this just came like shooting into my mind and I took a photo because I was, I was like, what the fuck is that?

[SPEAKER_00]: Anyways, well, back to the seemingly innocuous emojis that aren't innocuous.

[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I mean, I think cultural differences also play a big role in how you might interpret certain emojis that would seem innocuous to one culture.

[SPEAKER_01]: But if you, I think the clapping emoji, I read somewhere that in China refers to a sex act.

[SPEAKER_01]: Oh.

[SPEAKER_01]: Um, the kind of, I wonder what sex act.

[SPEAKER_01]: I didn't look into it, the nail polish sort of like flicking your wrist emoji, that in some places is like seen as offensive, the thumbs up emoji, that's even within one culture that's like heavily debated about like whether or not that's [SPEAKER_01]: Ernest were passive aggressive in the real housewives of Salt Lake City in the first season.

[SPEAKER_01]: There was this whole argument because one of the girls sent the other text and then she responded with a thumbs up emoji and she's like, that means fuck you.

[SPEAKER_01]: And the other one was like, no, it didn't.

[SPEAKER_01]: It was like everyone knows that thumbs up means FU.

[SPEAKER_01]: Generational differences too.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: I was like my dad will send a thumbs up and put a period and I'm like, [SPEAKER_01]: No, my mom gets really annoyed with her friend who censored thumbs-ups, but sometimes you're like, it is actually like a pretty succinct way of like being like sure.

[SPEAKER_01]: I think our communication styles as individuals play a big role in emoji use, which is also why I don't think they can be like a standardized replacement for a language.

[SPEAKER_01]: Because some people are much more literal of communicators.

[SPEAKER_01]: My grandma uses her emojis as like word replacements.

[SPEAKER_01]: She'll text me hey banana emoji just taking the dog emoji for a walk We'll be back around whatever if you want to come by for some wine emoji your banana.

[SPEAKER_01]: I'm banana.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, you but I think That's sort of a rare usage for emoji even though it almost feels like a more obvious one [SPEAKER_01]: I think as embellishment for tone which is maybe why we would hate the thumbs up emoji because for tone that does feel really dry Hello, yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: I like these emojis to quirk up sentences for embellishment.

[SPEAKER_01]: You feel silly.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I feel like [SPEAKER_00]: This is silly.

[SPEAKER_00]: This is why I know when you reply hello all to me.

[SPEAKER_00]: I know it's rude because you know you know Let us know is hello well.

[SPEAKER_00]: We've already asked and they said they all of the people of Adrienne said they would [SPEAKER_01]: And is it the same as a thumbs up?

[SPEAKER_00]: No.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's not as bad as a thumbs up.

[SPEAKER_00]: Uh, no.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's not as bad as a thumbs up.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's not as bad as a thumbs up.

[SPEAKER_00]: Uh, no.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's not as bad as a thumbs up.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's not as bad as a thumbs up.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's not as bad as a thumbs up.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's not as bad as a thumbs up.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's not as bad as a thumbs up.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's not as bad as a thumbs up.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's not as bad as a thumbs up.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's not as bad as a thumbs up.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's not as bad as a thumbs up.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's not as bad as a thumbs up.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's not as bad as a thumbs up.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's not as bad as a thumbs up.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's not as bad as a thumbs up.

[UNKNOWN]: It's not [SPEAKER_00]: But I think in our culture, L-O-L is just a simple for prosso-gression, just the L-O-L, within our generation.

[SPEAKER_00]: But how do you expect something's like kind of funny?

[SPEAKER_00]: And you're like, sure, ha-ha-ha.

[SPEAKER_00]: I go ha-ha, and then I put L-O-L I embed it within, you know.

[SPEAKER_00]: So I don't like texting.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, but you know, maybe you use emojis to embellish, so actually you do like texting, but even driving with us, I call you.

[SPEAKER_01]: But you never have a conversation, you're like, you can kind of slightly acknowledge something in them, move on, and text you can't do that because it's written now, you have to respond to everything written out to you.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's really demanding.

[SPEAKER_01]: Oh my gosh, get a grip.

[SPEAKER_01]: Good thing we're a person, so we don't have to have any of these issues for two weeks.

[SPEAKER_01]: So I want to go back to the cry laughing emoji, and I explained earlier that it was chosen because it was the most popular emoji used in 2015 in like Great Britain, but there's also something kind of interesting about this choice over, you know, [SPEAKER_01]: other emojis, and to explain it, I have this quote from the Guardian from Paula, Cocosa, where she noted that the immense popularity of the cry laughing emoji over, you know, a classic smiley quote, maybe in that emoji users are moving towards exaggeration or irony or fun, or that all this emoji use has brought everyone to a higher emotional plane.

[SPEAKER_01]: And I thought that was interesting, this idea of a higher emotional plane, like, do you think [SPEAKER_01]: help does become more emotive in our communications with one another, at least digitally, like, do you think or digitally, like, has it elevated the emotional experience of being online?

[SPEAKER_00]: No, like, I'm just thinking of the times in middle school when we were, like, [SPEAKER_00]: Oh my gosh, that's awesome, full, rufflecopter, lol, lol, like I think we were actually really emotive and cringe back in the day and maybe we got embarrassed about that, so now the emoji does the job for us, but I don't necessarily think it made us more emotive, you know?

[SPEAKER_00]: I guess it's like a flourish.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, but I don't know.

[SPEAKER_01]: I think so the lot of the people writing about this are probably millennial gen X writers and I read this New Yorker article by Adam Sternberg Where he wrote about his experience as a gen X or during the 90s when the exclamation point basically became this sort of [SPEAKER_01]: Exclusively ironic symbol.

[SPEAKER_02]: Mm-hmm.

[SPEAKER_01]: If they were adding it to the ends of like songs or movie titles Almost to be like giving a fake and static earplane.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, exactly Reaction it was almost like a smart album whoops now, but to actually earnestly use like an exclamation mark would be I think of all [SPEAKER_01]: And now he was kind of explaining how like just digital communication sort of requires you now to like like the explanation point to not use it would almost be weird like you have to show.

[SPEAKER_00]: We have to be trying to kind of space out when I use the explanation points in emails.

[SPEAKER_01]: But also like texting someone and adding a period.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: That's true.

[SPEAKER_00]: That reads really weird.

[SPEAKER_00]: This is true.

[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I'm coming at it from the perspective of like, a middle school or which wall do you like when I heard the internet?

[SPEAKER_00]: Uh, but now I'm sure I, I, I consistently forgot that adults were on there before me.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and a lot of the tech writing, um, and like, coverage that, uh, we use for this podcast especially from like the 20 tens.

[SPEAKER_01]: I always have to remind myself that it's being written by people who knew what life was like without social media.

[UNKNOWN]: Oh.

[SPEAKER_01]: pop-off, tell me about the explanation pointy, pop-off, but I thought that was an interesting way to think about it because I think maybe it's actually just that like emoji usage or like the population of the emoji hasn't like elevated us to this new emotional play, but it's actually required us to be more explicit in how we're feeling about something.

[SPEAKER_01]: in order for someone to not think we're being dry.

[SPEAKER_00]: Well, the sheer volume of communication we're doing digitally is just also growing exponentially.

[SPEAKER_00]: So it's like there's also that.

[SPEAKER_01]: But also, as we know, like, when we're trying to express such complex emotions using a simple emoji, it does sort of open the door for a lot of misinterpretation.

[SPEAKER_01]: And I wanted to put this to the test by putting two of my favorite emojis up in a poll on our Instagram.

[SPEAKER_01]: I wanted to see what our followers thought that they meant.

[SPEAKER_01]: So I answered this.

[SPEAKER_01]: She did.

[SPEAKER_01]: She was like the first answer.

[SPEAKER_01]: I think they were saying.

[SPEAKER_01]: Um, so...

[SPEAKER_01]: Don't tell about that.

[SPEAKER_00]: Do you have a parasolial relationship with your own vlog guys?

[SPEAKER_00]: I wanted to ditch into my fucking phone these days.

[SPEAKER_01]: Also when I posted it, I think it must have been like new in my time, so like seven a.m.

We were at time, just just on a morning scroll.

[SPEAKER_01]: I was.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it was fair.

[SPEAKER_01]: So the first was the upside down smiley, which I always kind of used to be like a chill out quirky instead of using a regular smiley.

[SPEAKER_01]: Because I feel like a regular smiley is a bit [SPEAKER_01]: to, I don't know, there's something kind of creepy about it, but to just use a normal.

[SPEAKER_01]: I just do colon, I do that a bit too, but I like, if I'm going to use an emoji.

[SPEAKER_00]: That's what you mean when you're doing that?

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, see, yeah, I responded to like, because I do it when I'm kind of salty or kind of frustrated with that.

[SPEAKER_01]: You and basically all of your followers.

[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know, girl, you're really in another, [SPEAKER_00]: operating in another internet.

[SPEAKER_00]: You're operating on web 4.0, and or web 1.5.

[SPEAKER_01]: I think it makes of the boat.

[SPEAKER_00]: I think it's web 1.0.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, well, I don't have a justification for that.

[SPEAKER_01]: My other favorite emoji to use is the one with the little puppy dog eyes.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's the pleading face, please.

[SPEAKER_01]: Which I always used to be shy or cutesy or like, woe is me.

[SPEAKER_01]: But there was a, like, a mix of interpretations from our followers.

[SPEAKER_01]: A lot of them were, like, people were interpreting it as pleased, like, my yetted.

[SPEAKER_01]: I wrote, please, but I also got feminist man trying to hit lustful yearning, cute, but ironic, cute, and being moved by something.

[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, interesting.

[SPEAKER_00]: Those are great answers because I do like what other emoji would you use to express that you've been moved by something But like orgasmic kind of like oh face, you know Take with a downturn like if you've been sincerely moved by something I don't think I would put an emoji for that that feels like grass [SPEAKER_00]: But I support whoever does this.

[SPEAKER_01]: Do you ever feel like if you express something and you don't add it emoji to like really like nail it down?

[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, it's going to sound like you're being sarcastic.

[SPEAKER_00]: I think I do a lot of the colon, like the kind of Christmile colon.

[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: I think that's a good one.

[SPEAKER_00]: I profaned my profanity.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: I know that.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: So speaking of which, what's your favorite emoji?

[SPEAKER_00]: From really long time, it was the smirk, like the sort, you know, the kind of smirking face.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: But now it's the cat smirk.

[SPEAKER_00]: You know, the cat who's smirking, she looks kind of mean.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that's you.

[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, right now that's my favorite one.

[SPEAKER_00]: What do you use it for?

[SPEAKER_00]: Literally everything.

[SPEAKER_00]: We'll put a context give it an example of a sentence a text you might add that to I'm in the code of the multi Cat smirk about she's real cool that one and then if I can pick a second I mean, I use the kind of the guy wearing the monocle a lot [SPEAKER_00]: Monical guy or kind of like demure smile.

[SPEAKER_00]: You know that one.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's not like big smile.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's like downturned eyes smile.

[SPEAKER_00]: Oh That you think that's bitchy.

[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not bitchy.

[SPEAKER_00]: I'm kind of sweet.

[SPEAKER_00]: Demure smile, but it's a little knowing It's a little more self-aware than the other smile.

[SPEAKER_00]: That's not like [SPEAKER_00]: You know, it's all like, that's true.

[SPEAKER_01]: But see, imagine trying to like use this sort of logic in emoji selection, texting like an elderly person.

[SPEAKER_01]: Like, I think the popularity of like, the emojis we really hate.

[SPEAKER_01]: Like the kind of like different variety of like laughing emojis or like using the wink emoji.

[SPEAKER_01]: The whole emoji, I feel silly for that.

[SPEAKER_01]: Even smile emoji.

[SPEAKER_01]: But those are for an older generation that would make the most sense.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it doesn't make sense.

[SPEAKER_01]: My parents definitely use those.

[SPEAKER_01]: My dad's favorite emoji is the one where it's just the old straight line for his mouth.

[SPEAKER_01]: And he's like, if someone says something like teasing him or something, he sends that to his heart.

[SPEAKER_01]: I'm not amused.

[SPEAKER_01]: I was like, I think that's a complex use of emoji.

[SPEAKER_00]: My mom is very evolved.

[SPEAKER_00]: sense of emojis like she's actually really good at them now she was like this is a woman who like she would take a photo on a camera and look above the camera at you instead of into the camera to take a photo but now she's like fluent it kind of frightens me actually I don't really know if I like it but she's very good at texting like very good with her use of language and [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I noticed that when I was hexing your mom.

[SPEAKER_00]: But that's not like your mom joke.

[SPEAKER_01]: No, no, it'll be a fine way.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah, what's on it?

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's under event of smirking cats.

[SPEAKER_01]: Which does my mom order favor to Moju?

[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.

[SPEAKER_01]: So to finish this episode off, I wanted to maybe return to Fred Benson, the emoji dick guy, and his quote about the emojis being either a low point or high point in communication.

[SPEAKER_01]: Now, 16 years passed when he gave this quote, what do we think?

[SPEAKER_01]: Like, do we feel like we can maybe assess this?

[SPEAKER_00]: I feel extremely neutral on them.

[SPEAKER_00]: I think that it's nice.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's a nice added element of the way that we communicate with each other, but it doesn't necessarily feel like it's taking anything over, so I can't feel negatively about it because, you know, there are a much bigger fish to fry in the world of text dying.

[SPEAKER_00]: So an ability to write sentences, you know, that the emoji doesn't actually feel like the biggest threat there is.

[SPEAKER_01]: Because I kind of see this era of like 2015, the year of the emoji, where a lot of these articles that I'm referring to in referencing were written.

[SPEAKER_01]: As this time, I think they were still kind of holding up the techno-utopian ideals.

[SPEAKER_01]: People were really excited about all the different ways we were going to be able to mimic real life online.

[SPEAKER_01]: because we didn't really realize that online was going to swallow real life so it was more like exciting to see what technology could do and I think when people were writing really excitedly about how emojis could help communicate better, could maybe help express your feelings better, add context.

[SPEAKER_01]: I see the optimism and I'm like, that is as it is, like a cool tool and a cool kind of advancement in human communication.

[SPEAKER_01]: But I think thinking about this season, thinking about, like you're saying, these bigger fish to fry in terms of [SPEAKER_01]: losing our ability to write in communicate in like the written word and also like our ability to maybe even communicate with each other in person like thinking about the emoji in this context can we maybe see a progression from the emoji helping us talk to each other maybe more authentically online to like this world we're now where people are developing relationships with chatbots and [SPEAKER_01]: a form or an extension of real communication?

[SPEAKER_01]: Wait, what's the question though?

[SPEAKER_01]: Um, like can you see, can you see that kind of like realizing them?

[SPEAKER_01]: We've ever been thinking about how the medium is message.

[SPEAKER_01]: If we're thinking about that, you know, and trying to assess what the emoji has done for communication, like it has changed the way that we write from this formalized way that really felt like we were setting a boundary between oral communication and written communication and turn written communication into almost like a mirror of oral communication.

[SPEAKER_01]: And I guess if we're thinking about now people, [SPEAKER_01]: Having these types of relationships with chatbods or like really like putting so much emphasis on digital communication like Do we yeah, do we see like the emoji is almost being sort of like a seedling yeah?

[SPEAKER_00]: I think that in many ways like the ways that we've turned to visual culture on the internet visual sound by it's you know [SPEAKER_00]: Or we've turned to kind of these more convenient ways of communicating like, you know, the chatbot, boyfriends and girlfriends, etc.

[SPEAKER_00]: Even notes, apologies, like putting something succinctly in a single kind of like casual form of communication that is supposed to be this really important statement or anything like this, like I do think that [SPEAKER_00]: I don't necessarily think that the emoji's like an early culprit, but I do think that it probably encapsulates that well in the ways that it kind of condenses information into a single visual object.

[SPEAKER_00]: I think that like the convenience of it and the collapsing almost of.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's almost like a simultaneous collapsing of nuance and enriching of nuance.

[SPEAKER_00]: Like it does feel like a nice encapsulation of [SPEAKER_00]: about turn for sure.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah, I guess I just think about them as like we're thinking about like what it's doing to our brain like how much more of an organic feeling conversation I can have with the over-text than maybe we'd be having over email 20 years ago.

[SPEAKER_01]: and more casual, more casual, and more casual turn for sure.

[SPEAKER_01]: We're able to talk to each other as if we're talking in person because like we're saying, there's more room for inference.

[SPEAKER_01]: There's less need to be like expressing things explicitly.

[SPEAKER_01]: So what it's doing to our brain, maybe is like treating those conversations as being, as if they were to happen, like as if, yeah, or being or being in the same category in our brain as like, [SPEAKER_01]: this conversation between you and me in person.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, we just kind of crazy thing to think about.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I mean, we've talked about this throughout the season, but like, you know, yesterday we were joking about how it's confusing to meet up with each other, not having you see each other in over a year, but not really having that intense sense of longing for another person because we have been communicating through this season, through texting, through whatever face time that it feels like it's supplanted or actual, [SPEAKER_00]: time hanging out yeah the actual like physical energy of that and I think what you realize when you actually see each other person said it can't like it hasn't in a can't.

[SPEAKER_01]: No and I think even like the impact of the reunion like yeah it's something you can't yeah like the reunion capital two yeah [SPEAKER_01]: But I think, I don't know if I'm thinking of people how this stage we've now gotten to like in human history where people are able to develop emotional connections to chatbots because we're now communicating with each other online as if we're communicating in person.

[SPEAKER_01]: I can see how the emoji is not the singular culprit at all.

[SPEAKER_01]: but just feels like an artifact of this sort of transition into maybe the global village or some other thing that Marshall McLuhan probably couldn't even imagine because who could, yeah, who could, yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, here we are.

[SPEAKER_00]: But all I got to say is it feels much better to be in person because I can, like, like, he says in one hearing with Sally, you get a wrinkle in the corner of your eyebrows when you're looking at me like one crazy, and I can't experience that in a pixelated, basically I'm called.

[SPEAKER_01]: And I know, especially when I have my beauty filter on.

[SPEAKER_00]: Rehash is hosted by Hannah Rain and Bee, my dear.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's produced and edited by me, and the intro and outro songs produced by our talented friend, Ian Mills.

[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks for listening.

[UNKNOWN]: Thank you.