Cultural diversity coming to cyberspace
Technology giant Apple is set to bring some cultural diversity to its Emojis.
Emojis are the ideograms, or smiley faces, used in electronic messages and webpages.
Apple was asked by email why there wasn’t more cultural diversity when it comes to Apple’s emojis.
Apple’s Vice President of Worldwide Corporate Communications Katie Cotton responded, saying Apple would consider increasing the cultural diversity in its electronic images.
“We agree with you. Our emoji characters are based on the Unicode standard, which is necessary for them to be displayed properly across many platforms,” she said.
“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.
“While we totally support representing more cultures, the emoji keyboard already seems long enough, and adding more pages may make it unwieldy.
“Maybe there’s a way they could introduce an emoji that can incorporate many cultures, or doesn’t single just one out,” Ms Cotton said.