YouSaid · the spoken record

Jeremy Burge

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65
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2016-08-03
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2016-08-03
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  1. “You know, from our perspective, There are a lot of policy decisions around emoji. Obviously, the world really cares about emoji whether or not it's a rifle emoji or the condom emoji or like professional women emoji. Part of the goal of emoji con is to open up that discussion so it is not just how that the unicorn”

    2016-08-03 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Meaning of Emoji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Did you based on this? Friends of mine put together a kind of Emoji survey art show, and there are some really great stuff in there, emoji tracker was there. There was a programming language built out of emoji.”

    2016-08-03 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Meaning of Emoji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “I was like, all right, I'll spare a coffee. I signed it. I sent it to them. And then they sent me this little, like, you know, certificate in digital form. And what's hilarious, and this is my favorite part, is that it's somehow listed as a translation of Moby Dick. So when you look up emoji dick, it says all these libraries have it because it's really just saying that like they have a translation. They have the original movie dick. Now it's got a life of its own and people still discover it.”

    2016-08-03 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Meaning of Emoji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Print and bulb. So I have to sell that one for them much. People still buy it. In 2013, the Library of Congress contacted me and they said we would like to acquire emoji dick as our first emoji book. I was like, are you sure? We're sure. And I was telling a friend. And David Gallagher, you must know from the times. And he's like, you know, Everyone submits their stuff to the library at Congress. It's not that big of a deal. And I was like, no, no, man. They asked for it, like, they're acquiring it.”

    2016-08-03 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Meaning of Emoji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Okay, so there are two copies. There's a black and white copy, which is like the easy to print one, and that's like $20 or $30. And then there's the full color one, which like is obviously preferable because emoji is so colorful. But when you're printing on demand 800 pages of color laser hardbound copy, it's actually really expensive. So that thing costs like $180.”

    2016-08-03 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Meaning of Emoji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “My goal was like 3,500 ended up raising $3,700. So I worked on it for nights and weekends for another like eight or nine months and then self-published it on Lulu.com. You can still buy it. It gets printed on demand.”

    2016-08-03 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Meaning of Emoji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Emoji nonsense. And some of the people were just like, All right, give me my five cents. I'm going to click some random emoji, and other people just like clicked every single emoji. So the plan became have people translate the same sentence multiple times so you get three different emoji translations for one sentence and then have another set of tasks where people vote on the best most appropriate translation so like of the three which one got the meaning across the best um and i was like oh it's just like getting really excited about this and i started doing the math and how much it was going to cost and i was like oh it's gonna be thousands and thousands of dollars that summer i met the kickstarter guys i started talking with andy bayo he was like you should put on kickstarter so that night i went home and put on kickstarter launched it the next day and ended up working for them and the way”

    2016-08-03 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Meaning of Emoji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Call me Ishmael is the first sentence of Moby Dick, and the emoji that the Turk worker chose was like, Telephone man with face, sailboat, whale emoji. It was perfect. The rest of it was just like indecipherable.”

    2016-08-03 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Meaning of Emoji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “You would have a sentence in the task and you say, pick any of these emoji. And then actually wrote my own little emoji picker because these things didn't exist at the time. I had gotten the emoji from a friend he had reversed engineered the iPhone SDK and basically hacked out. The PNG files from the software kit to basically have the raw emoji in image form. And so I took that and just made like a little JavaScript like HTML thing and dumped that into mechanical turquo and came back and I was like, hey, this works. And so I think the sentence that's kind of like on the cover of the book, if you go to the website, it's like being”

    2016-08-03 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Meaning of Emoji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Can capture that in emoji. So that's something I was going to do it as on a per sentence basis. And that actually turned out to be one of the challenging parts of the project was like splicing sentences is actually kind of like a classically hard and a natural language processing problem. And so I kind of like figured out a hack to like chop it up and I wrote a lot of regular expressions to basically get the whole book into sentences.”

    2016-08-03 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Meaning of Emoji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Right. It's still used for research. It's still invaluable for that. But a couple other people had done an experiment here or there of like using it off label. I had made a task of mechanical turk just to ask Turk workers. If you could ask anyone like to do anything on mechanical turk, what would you have them do? And they came up with this long list of stuff. And I don't think translate a book into emoji was one of them. But there's some creativity out there. I was like, okay, I'm going to try this thing or I'm going to hire people to translate Moby Dick into emoji. Some portion of it and see if this works. So I did the first chapter and the results came back and they were hilarious. They were so good. They were good.”

    2016-08-03 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Meaning of Emoji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Cute whale, yeah. The second, I think it's called sperm whale. Didn't come up until later. So I was like, okay, wow, that would be really interesting to do all of Moby Dick because it's also like really long. I mean, it's 10,000 sentences. And okay, well, if I don't want to do this, maybe I can hire somebody to do this. And I was like, experimenting with mechanical turk at the same time. I think it was like one of the original Amazon web services. It was like, it would later become, you know, part of that AWS umbrella. Yeah,”

    2016-08-03 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Meaning of Emoji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “In culture, and it's like one of those things where you tell it to somebody and they're like, you can't do that. That's crazy. And then you're like, well, the fact that you just said that made me want to do it. And so.”

    2016-08-03 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Meaning of Emoji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Did you make them up? Like, what'd you do? So I had gotten in a text from my college roommate whose wife is Japanese. He sent me an emoji and I was like, what is that? They told me you could download like I basically a Japanese app and it would like awaken your iPhone to the emoji keyboard like it just spoke to me in the like like you have to hack the iPhone to get the special keyboard of like Japanese icons and I was like oh my god I want this so bad I was like this is amazing I should write a book an emoji and I was like that's a lot of work and I don't know if I can write a whole book an emoji and then I was like well maybe I can translate a book in emoji I was like okay what books would work and I was like well it has to be in the public domain because I worked a lot in like the copyright reform space nobody's either just like let me translate their book into emoji without a lot of effort for a moment I thought about the Bible and I was like that's too obvious what's like what's like totally even more inappropriate”

    2016-08-03 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Meaning of Emoji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “So going back to you writing an entire book in emoji, and yet you're saying that you've kind of evolved in your thinking that emoji is not necessarily language, but clearly it is a visual language and it is a tool for communication. It's not complete. So how did you translate that? I mean, what were some of the trade-offs and decisions you made? And by the way, for the audience, that book was like 2009, or that was like many years ago.”

    2016-08-03 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Meaning of Emoji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “The myth and the man Coming together and using emoji as the first time I thought about this could be kind of like putting on a mask over your, you know, self to, yeah, over your words to convey to yourself this extra, this kind of additional layer, this emphasis of your emotion that you otherwise might not get.”

    2016-08-03 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Meaning of Emoji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “A mask represents a very Cambelian idea, right? The Joseph Campbell mask, the myth and the man. You're right. There's a theater aspect. I mean, that's why people say improv is so interesting for any career field. But I think that there is an interesting moment now coming together with selfie stickers, emoji, bitmojis all together where we do have this new emotional web coming together.”

    2016-08-03 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Meaning of Emoji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “It takes me back to like theater and like Shakespeare in like seventh and eighth grade. I remember having these really intense discussions about like what it is to put on a mask and a mask represents. It's a very Cambellian idea.”

    2016-08-03 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Meaning of Emoji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “I agree. And in fact, this is going to be sound like a little out of left field for a moment, but the whole notion around the Chibacca mask lady. When that was the most popular Facebook Live video ever, it got unprecedented views. And it was simply a woman who was trying on her chewbacca mask in the car. And she's laughing and giggling about it. Then she puts her mask on. And then she takes it off and she laughs so uninhibitedly. It's insane. And I make the argument that what was so empowering, because it was totally took off for obvious reasons, is not the fact that she was laughing so uninhibitedly. It's a fact that it took putting on and then taking off the mask for her to do that, which is a lot. Not unlike what happens with communication through these filters and being able to now express yourself through these cartoon like ways.”

    2016-08-03 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Meaning of Emoji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “I also think it ties into this slightly dubious notion of the uncanny valley, where if you want to try to represent yourself and you want to have like configurability around that, it needs to be kind of cartoonish for it to be believable. I think what we're seeing with Snapchat filters and I don't know if you guys have played with Snow yet. That's like a takechat filters and just multiply them by a thousand. It's like just like amazing amounts of diversity around the amount of stuff you can put on your face. It is this weird convergence on identity and emoji that's kind of happening.”

    2016-08-03 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Meaning of Emoji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Right, especially given that they are changing this culture of how you express yourself through your facial expressions with face swapping and filters, Connie and I made the argument that it's sort of like selfies as selfies as a form of stickers. So what we're talking about, the machine readable, it's a little distinct than this, but it's sort of an interesting ideal.”

    2016-08-03 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Meaning of Emoji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “My cousins and I use Bitmojen What's up all the time? I think there's something really symbolically important about Bitmoji because you are putting yourself in it and conveying in this sticker form. The fact that Snapchat bought it, I think is really telling 100.”

    2016-08-03 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Meaning of Emoji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “The sentiments of generally correlate very strongly with human face and body. So I think this is also why people agitate so much for emoji that look like themselves, like the redheads and people with beards and people, you know, who are bald.”

    2016-08-03 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Meaning of Emoji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “That's right machine readable data. That is a holy grail of emotional sentiment understanding. When I was at Wired, I assigned a piece to a sociologist Evan Sollinger because I wanted to coin this phrase, the mood graph, because we have an interest graph, social graph, you know, all kinds of other graphs that link all these nodes and ideas and now to have like a mood graph to essentially be able to put your pulse on someone's mood, something very finite, yet constantly changing. It's just a fascinating thing to be able to codify this.”

    2016-08-03 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Meaning of Emoji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “One of the reasons there is that words have these degrees of freedom. They can be sarcastically and you would never know it based on the semantics. And so traditional sentiment analysis is really broken because you're using these kind of like stale, rigid semantic definitions. What's really interesting about Facebook reactions is you think you're saying, I love this thing or I'm sad about this or I'm angry about this. What you're actually doing in conjunction with that is giving Facebook really great labeled data for sentiment analysis.”

    2016-08-03 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Meaning of Emoji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Right. And just to interject for a moment as someone who's been tested in a million of those systems and can never find one that actually works for Miami needs. They're so binary. You don't get anything useful. You're not getting insight.”

    2016-08-03 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Meaning of Emoji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “I think it's a really interesting topic because if you look at traditional sentiment analysis in the data world, it's kind of a joke. You have to have training data. You have to know good cases. Right.”

    2016-08-03 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Meaning of Emoji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Going back to this idea of some of the companies owning their own emoti and some of the proprietary open tension between standardization, freedom of expression, what do you make of this notion that part of what we're doing here is essentially also creating a more machine-readable web in terms of emotional reading? Because essentially you're now adding a whole new layer where you can codify people's emotions, sentiment in ways beyond just a black and white like don't like.”

    2016-08-03 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Meaning of Emoji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “And for a while, it was just like the heart emoji or something, or just the smiling face emoji. So I think it's really interesting when the top emoji shuffle because whenever you start texting with somebody who hasn't used emoji before, they're like choosing like the safest ones”

    2016-08-03 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Meaning of Emoji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Face with tears of joy, which I always thought looked very sad. The thing with the eyes and it's like bawling, but that's actually face of tears of joy. And that is how you know that because, you know, all these emoji.”

    2016-08-03 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Meaning of Emoji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “And then also, if you think about the accessibility issues around stickers, right? Like people using screen readers, they're not going to be able to interpret an image. And emoji actually have names. And so in theory, there's much better accessibility for emoji for somebody who's visually impaired.”

    2016-08-03 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Meaning of Emoji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “Well, that goes, and then your point about why standardization is important because you're now giving up that you're in this proprietary ecosystem like WeChat or Line and you only have their sticker set and you don't you can't always transfer all these stickers across”

    2016-08-03 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Meaning of Emoji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “Emoji doesn't preclude the use of stickers. There is some set of images that are universal enough that should be hardwired into the operating systems and are basically can be cross-platform that an iOS device can talk to Microsoft, Windows, and can talk to.”

    2016-08-03 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Meaning of Emoji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “Saying this as a standardization person because my friend Connie, who wrote a wonderful post on the topic of stickers, argues that emoji are very limited for what you need to do because she feels that you have so much more expression and the ability to convey so much more with stickers than you do with emoji.”

    2016-08-03 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Meaning of Emoji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “And I think you can, you know, in certain apps, you can apply a sticker to an image that it sits on top of it. But you're then in this kind of like proprietary ecosystem of that's okay. But like you think about the stuff that really works and the stuff that really changes the future of the web and communication, it's all standardized, right?”

    2016-08-03 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Meaning of Emoji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “So, stickers. I mean, so kimoji, for example. Kim Kardashians quote emoji. They're actually emoji. Those are just stickers or images that you can text back and forth, but again, standards, can you put it in the subject line in my email and those you can't.”

    2016-08-03 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Meaning of Emoji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “Emoji probably won't ever have that amount of customization. And Unicode gets this. And they actually say, we're adding 60 emoji a year. This is unsustainable. We feel like the future is inline images. And that kind of breaks my heart as like kind of a nerd standardization guy who really appreciates all the hard work that went into Unicode and the idea that it is a standard because if you're just sending inline images forever, then like, you know, you have no idea what is going to be on the other side if they can render the image.”

    2016-08-03 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Meaning of Emoji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “The features, like that's a great point, actually, because one of the pet peeves I have is when I used to go to foreign countries and look at billboards, it always glorified that equally knows the face structure, whereas there's a totally different type of face structure in different areas.”

    2016-08-03 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Meaning of Emoji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “So now the kind of evolution is that we have yellow for all of the human face characters, and then you can choose skin tones for some of them. But it doesn't get at more nuanced issues about cultural and racial identity having to do with facial structure or hairstyle. Oh, right.”

    2016-08-03 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Meaning of Emoji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “Choose the yellow skin tone. That's just like the, I feel way more comfortable. To my solution is I often send four. It's like it'll be like yellow, light, dark, and then like a Benaton ad in an emoji world.”

    2016-08-03 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Meaning of Emoji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “I would totally agree. I don't share your experience as that as the person on the other side. And so it's funny for me because I don't. Yeah, and for those of you who are not seeing red, I'm a white guy. I don't share that sense of identification with the bright white infletsman index. That's not necessarily me. I'm like, it feels odd to opt into that, which speaks to my privilege as a white male where I just like.”

    2016-08-03 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Meaning of Emoji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “If you have like only white men designing them. Do you remember when Slack there was this guy who wrote a post about Jessica Brownie? And I remember it was so meaningful because it's such a minor, seemingly arbitrary thing. But then it is true, like the first time I saw that I could find my skin color in a system and to be able to use it was kind of amazing. And empowering. And I think there's something significant about that.”

    2016-08-03 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Meaning of Emoji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “I mean, there's a great history about this in this is going to sound weird for me to say, but like women's pantyhose had this issue where nude was always considered Caucasian and people were like, this is ridiculous. It was one of the earliest blind spots of emoji I remember was like”

    2016-08-03 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Meaning of Emoji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “Well, how do they handle the skin tone issue? Because one of the things that I noticed is that an apple, because I use an Android, so I didn't notice this. You can press down on a thumbs up, for example, and then you can pick among 15 different shades to like pick a skin coat shade that's closest to you or five.”

    2016-08-03 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Meaning of Emoji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “You get way more degrees of freedom to kind of express yourself. There's a finite number of food items that are over to go in there. And when you think about the vast multitudes of humanity, whether it's people's relationship status or sexual orientation or skin color, it's like emoji is never going to be able to express that. And so how do you contain this thing that's like growing and kind of has to grow as more and more people use it, but also by definition has to be a finite list of icons.”

    2016-08-03 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Meaning of Emoji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “To the point about politics being kind of embedded in emoji, it's not just because these are icons that represent the parts of our lives that we feel passionate about. It's because there's a finite palette. It's not like language where you can only, you know, you can kind of combine say whatever you want.”

    2016-08-03 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Meaning of Emoji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “What they did was they built this kind of like meta country system so that you would actually be pairing these country letter emojis together. So CNN would go together and then it would be up to your phone to decide if you showed the Chinese flag. They pushed that decision making that like political decision making of which flags to support off to the handset manufacturer.”

    2016-08-03 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Meaning of Emoji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “Right. Emoji already has a gun in it, right? And it's like, okay, so how many more versions of that do we need? And you're right. It's absolutely a political topic. I mean, it issue manifests itself in so many other places in emoji. The country flag stuff is super interesting because that uses kind of what Jenny's talking about with these compound emojis. Unicode didn't actually want to decide which flags were and weren't in emojis. Right.”

    2016-08-03 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Meaning of Emoji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “That's it. Oh my God. It just goes to show you how the politics, I mean, of course, this is the politics of human life play out in these systems. I mean, the perfect example I was thinking of is a rifle emoji and the case of, I believe, Apple, Google, and Facebook, Charlie Warzell at BuzzFeed wrote a really detailed article investigating this and about how they sort of help suppress as part of the Unicode Consortium the rifle emoji. Right.”

    2016-08-03 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Meaning of Emoji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “I'm so glad you brought that up because it's so important to not get caught up in technology time. Well, technically, technology includes sticks and unstones. So that does go back in time. But in the context of this machine web that we live in, then we have emoticons as part of the taxonomy. And then we have emoji, but how would you guys define emoji?”

    2016-08-03 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: The Meaning of Emoji · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source