Unicode, I Am A Witness

Strange how some of the little things you do can ripple, and have much wider impacts.

My company was collaborating on an idea that encouraged kids to share their experiences with bullying through art and stories -- and they wanted to emoji to support an effort to flip it around by targeting those that witnessed bullying to be empowered. I had a small part in their success getting this emoji accepted.

ℹ️ Info

~ Aristotle Sabouni
Created: 2022-01-16

Someone internally (Megan Dale) needed connections to try to get to buy-in for the eye emoji (Unicode character adoption by Apple, Google and Microsoft) to get it as part of their anti-bullying (I Am A Witness) campaign: 👁‍🗨, that my company was working on with Ad Council, Goodby Silverstein & Partners and a host of media companies. I connected her up to our representative (Ken Lunde), who got her a spot in a Unicode lunch meeting to make our case: and acceptance and adoption were stunningly fast (only a few months).

Since the launch, this had over 100M impressions on the Internet campaign, and dozens of TV, Radio stations picked it up. So it was a good, fluffy effort to help victims of bullying, and encourage kids to speak up and say, "Eye see what you did there, and it's not OK".

Conclusion[edit | edit source]

Do I think this is a good thing? Kinda, but not significantly. It was short term, but now mostly forgotten, like many/most political trends.

In the grand scheme of things, this was fluffy bullshit. Creating a character for a fad campaign is something Unicode should have not done: this is not universal, is not forever, and is not going to become part of the language, even visual language -- so is a waste of bits.

Still, it's the exact kind of fluffy/stupid thing that a political organization like Unicode could get behind. Thus it doesn't hurt much, it might help a little in the short term, and it makes a few people feel good/sanctimonious about making a difference.

My job is to help them and the company get what they want, no matter what my personal beliefs on this are. So I'm both happy that I helped them do it. And roll my eyes that this is what people wanted to prioritize, over something more on target: like defining a real language-based set of hieroglyphs that were more complete, or ways to try to enforce consistency (and remove political correctness) so that companies can't bend the language with their interpretation of inanimate objects.

🔗 More

Adobe
Some things I've experienced or observed while working at Adobe.

Emoji
Universal symbols (hieroglyphs) for signage is good. Political Correctness defining them makes them dumb

Microsoft
Microsoft is a surprisingly good company now... but it wasn't always that way.

🔗 Links

Tags: Adobe/all Emoji Microsoft