The emoji revolution tries to answer ‘how technology is shaping the future of communication’. In the first chapter, the continuous change of our practices of communication and the position that emoji have on the broad spectrum of language are discussed. In chapter 2, Seargeant glances over the history of language evolution. Next, he separates spoken and written language, and discusses how emotion is expressed differently in both cases. In chapter 4, the author focuses on how people (might) use emoji, and the influence of modern technologies—including SMS language—in language evolution. In chapter 5, he dwells on the shaping forces of technology, regarding both our behavior and our relation to and with language.
The book then focuses on how emoji, and their meaning, are not as conventionally used—and accepted—as natural languages, which are heavily governed by rules and dictionaries. Chapter 6 discusses how emoji are used in different situations (e.g. breaking up, mourning, etc.). Chapter 7 concludes by stating that a single organization tries to manage the cultural and political meaning of emoji, but that users do not necessarily commit to those meanings.
Chapter 8 explores whether emoji function as language, by looking at emoji-only texts, but finds that contemporary emoji fall short in doing so. It indeed is a hotchpotch of emotions, animals, and (other)worldly stuff varying from tangible (e.g. the wrapped gift emoji) to farfetched (e.g. the man in business suit levitating emoji). But like pidgin—as mentioned by the author—we have to make do with what we have. The final chapter warns the reader for emoji's corporate agenda, Disneyfication of our communication, the mainly positive emotions emoji represent, and the cultural identity ‘clash’ they cause, amongst others. While these critiques are worth discussing, it becomes clear that the discussion will not be over by the end of the book.
For example, the first critique—about the corporate agenda—might be legitimate: there is a relatively small committee, consisting of companies and institutions, seventeen of those with voting rights, deciding which emoji to include, develop, maintain, or discontinue. But the Unicode Consortium—the organization devoted to the development of a universal digital character set, including emoji—does accept third party emoji proposals, for example, the dumpling emoji (proposed by Jennifer 8. Lee, an emoji that also works for anything from empanadas to pierogi) and the woman wearing a hijab emoji (proposed by Rayouf Alhumedhi, a fifteen-year-old German student). These two examples, also mentioned by Seargeant, show that emoji development is more than a corporate agenda.
The final chapters mainly expose that sociolinguistics is only beginning to grasp the emoji's influence on languaging. The emoji revolution is a good basis for those new to the topic, although they should be aware of its eclectic nature and that it is not able to provide all of the answers it set out to find. This should be reason, however, for other researchers to engage with the topic and to dive deeper into the universe of round faces and its constituency of foods, vehicles, everyday household items, and culturally relevant particularities.
