The secret life of 🐕
This week: emoji triggers, YouTube tea, ultra-fast-fashion, MLMs, TikTok face and Seth Abramson
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Emoji were supposed to exist in some platonic realm beyond textual language — a cross-cultural, pictographic vernacular that anyone could understand. But 24 years in, many of those icons are actually associated, behind the proverbial scenes, with explicit, codified, textual meanings that most of us don’t appreciate or acknowledge. When you type a word like “dog” on an iPhone, for instance, the phone automatically suggests the emoji 🐕.
🐕 = “dog,” in other words. Except when “dog” = 🥡. That is bad.
This past week, Instagram executive Adam Mosseri was forced to tweet a non-apology to the app’s users when it came out that people searching “dog” GIFs and emojis for their Instagram Stories were prompted to use the 🥡 emoji, instead. Instagram’s “system,” Mosseri explained, had somehow associated the Chinese takeout container with the keyword “doggy bag.”
Personally, I have questions. Like: How, exactly, does an emoji become associated with extraneous keywords? Is it automatic or artificially intelligenced, based on user behavior? Or are keywords mapped statistically onto each emoji, based on the similarity of related words (as in the very cool Emoji Search)? And in either case, does anyone ever review these pairings — which are suggested every day, to millions of people — to make sure they’re not, you know … terrible?
Alas, there’s not a ton of information on the open internet about this, and I haven’t attempted to pry any answers from the tight fists of Apple or Facebook. (Respectfully, this IS still a free newsletter.) But it’s my anecdotal observation that extraneous keywords, or those that go beyond Unicode’s bareboned, very literal suggestions, absolutely vary by platform — and to some extent reflect how the communities on each platform use them.
“Labor,” as a keyword, is a telling example. (I tried a bunch of abstract words on Instagram, Venmo, Emoji Search and two different iPhones, to see which emoji they’d trigger.) Instagram and iOS both come up with 👷 — Unicode keywords: “construction worker,” “construction,” “hat.” But Venmo surfaces a sun ☀️ and, secondarily, a beach 🏖 — presumably because its users attach those emoji to payments for their Labor Day vacations.
Similarly, on Venmo, “dog” turns up a red-and-gold rectangle — what I’m pretty sure is a custom red envelope emoji 🧧️, released to accompany Lunar New Year gifts in the last Year of the Dog. And Instagram’s first emoji for “high” — 🙏 — likely relates to the almost reflexive pairing of brags and gratitude (#blessed!) on that platform.
Anyway — this episode of “overthinking the internet with Caitlin” has gone on long enough. But please send in your weird, conspicuous emoji keywords for a future release. Until then … let’s read some links! 🔗💃
If you read anything this weekend
I am increasingly convinced that everyone’s hitting the pandemic depression wall at once, because this week served up an embarrassment of unabashedly *fun* reads. It’s as if everyone threw their hands up at once and decided to talk about something else! (Jk, I know I’m projecting.)
For real, though: We all love a good MLM saga, and this week I’ve got two. First up, regular Links fave Bridget Read on multilevel marketing firms’ (egregious!) pandemic campaign to recruit unemployed, stressed and straight-up suicidal women. Follow that with this slightly eye-rollier take on the politicians hawking MLMs. (Don’t panic yet — they’re all small-time, and there’s only three of them).
I don’t go in for celebrity gossip, really, but damn — this profile of deuxmoi was clever. By the end I was ready to join a Facebook group and sleuth out her name myself. Elsewhere in the internet gossip world, YouTube tea channels are covering influencers in a way no one else can. But they also get it wrong, a lot of the time, in part because many are run by … literal children.
Speaking of children, y’all have read this CJR profile of Seth Abramson, right? And then all his angry threads about it? And then the angry threads about his angry threads? I hope we get another day out of this.
Finally: I have long wondered what business model could possibly underpin online retailers like Shein, NastyDress and FairySeason. I’m delighted that The Atlantic published this thorough report, though the answer is still apparently “unchecked exploitation.”
Postscripts
“Fresh Roasted Freedom.” TikTok face. Goals. “The Lex Luther of the internet,” in his own words. The case of the mysteriously popular flower photo and the case for semicolons. This is better than any meditation app I’ve ever used. (Plz do not view while on drugs!)
The absurd logic of internet recipe hacks. (Spoiler: There really is none.) An appreciation of the office, though I hope to never again enter one. Two feel-good revivals I didn’t see coming: Myspace and Rebecca Black. Confession: Before “Nemo” was our dog’s name, we did … call the Roomba that. Inside the Instagram birria boom. Personalized ASMR. Last/not least: “If an entire generation is choosing tenuous ‘fame’ over a 9-5 … shouldn’t we be asking what makes ‘traditional’ jobs so unappealing rather than mocking the alternative?”
That’s it for this week! Until the next one. Warmest virtual regards.
— Caitlin
In the postscript “This is better than any meditation app I’ve ever used“ is linking to the VF deuxmoi story and not a calming, introspective, mindfulness encouraging meditation story as implied by the link.