Driving Diversity
In case you are a frequent user of ‘smileys’ on your phone and any other electronic platform, you might be interested in joining the debate of the black Emojis. The black Emoji innovation has not only stirred up a lot of reactions on social media but has also created a battleground for two tech companies, Apple and Oju. to duke it out.
It has now come to the world’s attention that the tech giant, Apple, will soon be revealing a BETA version of iOS 8.3 for testers that includes a more racially diverse character set. This will allow users to pick from a palette of skin tones on several different Emojis. This move seems to have been prompted by complaints by celebrities like Miley Cyrus and Tahj Mowry over a lack of racial diversity in Apple’s emojis, going by the trend on twitter #emojiethnicityupdate.
However, it seems that Apple may be re-inventing the wheel after a Mauritius based app company called Oju Africa announced a few hours later that it had already tackled the lack of racial diversity by introducing it’s own set of Afro-emoticons on the Google app market, Play Store. Oju Africa chief executive, Alpesh Patel, was quoted on a CNN interview as saying, “It’s very important for us as a small African company, to make it known to the world that we were the first to do it.”
He further went on to say that it is something the company thought about in the year 2012 because of their core business, Mi Phone. They had to compare what the market already has and how they could make their phones more market relevant and more relevant to the people they supply to.
Some people do not even notice the racial bias in the emoticon , if indeed it is there. This also depends a lot on where the innovation first took place. It is believed that the emoticons were first created and used in Japan and then in 2010 embraced by other technological hubs in order to improve interaction. This therefore justifies their current colour and name (Emoji) a Japanese name which literally means picture.
It could also be argued that that the invention of the black emojis is a politically incorrect move in itself, because people do not only want to be confined to their culture. On the other hand, it could be a baseline for business entrepreneurs who just want to create an up-market for themselves and so do not really care about the race. When we think about globalisation however then the black emojis presence would not really be big deal. Other debates have sparked up including gender discrimination on the emoticons, as the female emoticons are not diversely represented in terms of authority like the police.
Meanwhile we can just sit back and anticipate the use of black emojis on our handsets soon.
