Secular Technology: Apple Wants Emojis To Be Multicultural | TechTree.com

Secular Technology: Apple Wants Emojis To Be Multicultural

A small step towards making technology equal for all.

 

Emoji or Emoticons have become an integral part of the way we express ourselves in messages, emails and elsewhere, but they aren't exactly diverse in the people/faces they depict. Very few emoji are non-caucasian and to find out what's being done to fix that, MTV Act contacted Apple to find out they're already on the job.

 

“Our emoji characters are based on the Unicode standard, which is necessary for them to be displayed properly across many platforms. There needs to be more diversity in the emoji character set, and we have been working closely with the Unicode Consortium in an effort to update the standard,” said Katie Cotton, a spokesperson for Apple.

 

Recently, the debate over whether emoji are racist and if technology is truly secular have been doing their rounds. Including a more diverse set of emoticons may be a small step towards making technology unbiased, but goes a long way in creating a society of equals.

 

According to The Verge, Apple's last big emoji update came in 2012 with the roll-out of gay and lesbian couple emoji as part of its iOS 6 update. The update didn't require the installation of any third party apps either to get access to the special character set.


TAGS: Mobile Phones, Apple, iOS, emoji, secular technology

 
IMP IMP IMP
##