Podcast 35

Colon, minus sign, parenthesis - not an excerpt from our writing 101 class, but three simple key strokes that would give way to an online revolution. The very first emoji was born on September 19th in '82 when a computer science student was worried his jokes in the university chatroom fell flat. Gimlet's Not Past It, picks a moment from the current week in history and explores how it shapes our world today. The Birth of Emojis is fun and exactly the subject you didn't know you wanted to learn more about until you're ten seconds into the podcast. Like all cool kids, we originally scoffed at the use of emojis and never thought we'd be one for sending them, but now . . . it's all smiley faces, high fives, dancing ladies. And we've quickly learned not to use the cry laughing emoji, or we will age ourselves. It's all about the skull these days, if you find something funny, highlighting how the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee adapts to changing social landscape. As lifelong learners, we love how this podcast dives into the history of and need for these images to compensate in nonverbal, non-face-to-face communication. To think . . . it all started with a man worried his jokes were taken too seriously :-)