Palm If This Emoticon Yourself Want Isn't Where Including Intense Requests To Unicode.

Do you have a favorite emoji? Maybe a wink or a laughing face. Perhaps if you're feeling a little more cynical, this is a smiling face with jazz hands. With over 3,000 to choose from, there's plenty to choose from. But what happens when one of the emojis you want is missing? Rachel Murphy works for DroneUp, an unmanned aerial vehicle service company based in Virginia Beach, USA.

Text Rachel Murphy and Amy Wygand sent sample graphics to Unicode as part of their drone emoji app. "I tweet and post every day, and my reaction to my knees is to inspire people with emojis," he said. But the absence of a drone icon on the list means Rachel is forced to use a helicopter or flying saucer instead. "It doesn't cover what a drone is, nor does it act as an adequate substitute for it."

Rachel begins researching who controls the emoticons and how to add drones to the official character roster, updated every year or so.

White and male

The new proposals were approved or rejected by a group known as the Emoji Subcommittee, part of the Unicode Consortium, a non-profit organization composed of representatives from most of the world's largest technology companies, including Google, Microsoft, Adobe, and Huawei.

They meet regularly in California's Silicon Valley and choose emoticon designs, ideas for new characters that can come from anyone, anywhere. This is an entirely open application process. But who are the people who sit at the table and decide whether proposals are put to the vote and added to every smartphone or rejected outright?

The group is "mostly older, mostly white, mostly male," says Jennifer 8 Lee, co-founder of Emoji Nation, which helps people create new emoticons. He has the number 8 as his father's name. He likened attending an emoji subcommittee meeting to attending a religious gathering. "He wanted to perform at the new church for the first time; they were much older, good white people," he said.

Rachel Murphy's research led her and her DroneUp partner Amy Wygand, who carefully crafted proposals and confirmed drone emoticons. This includes online drone search stats, sample graphics, and passionate requests to Unicode. "The main reason for using drones is to save lives, search and rescue and find missing people," said Weigand.

But it doesn't have to be. Unicode rejected their offer. "We were quite shocked when we got the news," Rachel said. The Emoji subcommittee says drones are a completely new technology and may not last long. "Respectfully, we strongly disagree," he said.

Japanese market

Scroll through the emoticon keyboard, and you'll see lots of superfluous tech images: pagers, faxes, even floppy disks because once an emoji is added, it's never removed. As a result, Unicode is wary of adding more characters, leading to a useless keyboard mess in a few years.

However, for Ms. Weigand, it's confusing because there are so many outdated devices that symbolize all smartphones in the world, while new technologies like drones are rejected. "I haven't seen a floppy disk since the 1980s," he said. Seems disappointed, Ms. Weigand asked: "Who are you, Unicode, and who do you think you are?"

The man behind the band is Mark Davis, who oddly looks like a wizard emoji. He is the co-founder and president of the Unicode Consortium and has helped launch various global emoticons. When he founded the consortium in the early 1990s, Unicode's goal was to encode all the world's languages ​​into a universal system that would allow digital text to be accurately uploaded and downloaded regardless of language, location, or device.