Yesterday Apple CEO Tim Cook took the stage in San Jose, California, to show off the company's latest work at Apple's annual World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC). Per usual protocol, Cook and underlings discussed the next iteration of Apple's iPhone and iPad operating system, iOS 12. As there are an estimated 1.3 billion Apple devices in use around the world, any updates to Apple's iOS will affect the consumption habits, desires and communication style of hundreds of millions of users. This year, the operating system updates constituted largely superficial bells and whistles, ranging from a phone tool to combat tech addition and the curious addition of an emoji feature called "Memoji."
Memoji, as you may have surmised from the “emoji” suffix, constitute Apple's attempt to design a more personalized version of emoji, unique to the user. Those familiar with Bitmoji (a Snapchat-owned product) or Apple's previous "Animoji" (a mashup of "animated emoji") feature will recognize this as a synthesis of the two: Memoji allow users to create customized emojis of themselves, like Bitmoji, but with faces animated in real-time akin to its Animoji.
Memoji, like Animoji, can respond to facial expressions via the camera, and will allow you to essentially create an animated cartoon of yourself — a caricatured, personalized avatar that smiles, blinks, and talks in sync with your own movement. Apple's facial recognition software recognizes the user's facial features and animates the Memoji in real-time; the company highlighted that its Animoji and Memoji can now tell when the user sticks out their tongue.
"We wanted to take Animoji even further," said Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of Software Engineering. "You can now create your very own, personalized Animoji."
"We're all going to be sticking out our tongues to our phones in the near future," Federighi added.
Despite the potential for the tongue-detection feature to be used for obscenities — as tech blog Mashable explicitly pointed out (cough cough, sexting) — the starring role of the Memoji announcement during the renowned conference suggests that the craze over personalized avatars — a trend inaugurated by Bitmoji — is not some throwaway digital-vogue fad.
Rather, Apple's announcement that they are going all in on Memoji suggests that they will be part of our future for years to come: we will identify with these digital caricatures of ourselves and our friends for years, perhaps decades, as they inch towards being an ineradicable part of our culture. As this becomes our reality, it is worth contemplating: why is our society so obsessed with these cartoonish images of ourselves? And what do they say about our culture?
Linda Kaye, a cyber-psychologist at Edge Hill University who has studied the psychology behind emojis extensively, said Apple’s investment in the Memoji feature makes sense from a business perspective.
“Because emoji are still immensely popular, it makes sense to capitalise on this by creating something more personalized and exciting to users,” Kaye wrote in an email.
Some thought 2015 was the year that emojis peaked. Indeed, Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year in 2015 was not actually a word, but the "Face with Tears of Joy” emoji. A 2015 report found that 92 percent of online consumers use emojis. While some experts speculated that the rise in popularity of emojis suggests humans are becoming less intelligent, or lazy (to use their words), Kaye has debunked this. In a separate interview with Vice, Kaye suggested that our enthusiasm for emojis could be seen as a creative outlet.
Kaye said similar to emoji, Apple’s new Memoji is a form of “self-presentational behaviour.”
“Memoji can be considered a form of self-presentational behaviour, in a similar way to using photos, emoji, etc.,” she wrote to Salon. “This allows us to put across our ‘best self’ to others.”
Self-presentational behavior is a social psychological term used to describe how people want to control or shape how an audience views them. The idea behind self-presentational behavior is that it enables humans to better hide their flaws.
Kaye added that Memoji could be an opportunity for people to create “a personalized expression of themselves and therefore can be used really well as a form of self-presentational expression.”
Understandably, some may see communicating through a screen with a digital mask as faintly dystopian. After all, the popular dystopian sci-fi series "Black Mirror" featured a season two episode, "The Waldo Moment," explicitly about a comparable digital avatar controlled by a human's face that morphed into an authoritarian political figurehead. In David Foster Wallace's novel "Infinite Jest", Wallace envisions a world in which video conferencing becomes the norm, and where the obsession over self-presentation leads consumers to spend vast sums on real-time facial and body editing to make them look unblemished.
Fortunately, Kaye says it is unlikely Memoji will take over all forms of digital communication.
“I wouldn’t anticipate that Memoji will take over Facetiming or all online communication in the same way that emoji haven’t fully replaced language,” she said. “Yes there are times when these symbols can be used to replace certain words, but in the main part, they provide a supplementary and enriching element to communication.”
Yet there is a dark side to the increasing idolization and trendiness of the emoji and their subsidiary by-products. Emoji have sparked an unofficial culture war over the politics of the limited number of chosen symbols and figures, which are selected by largely opaque committees whose members are plucked mostly from corporations and universities in the Western World.
Memoji also raises questions about the psychology behind digital expression. According to a 2015 survey by Bangor University, 72 percent of participants between 18 to 25 said they felt more comfortable expressing themselves using emoji than words. If this is the case, one wonders how our new communication regime might hinder face-to-face communication. When speaking face-to-face, humans can pick up on non-verbal cues.
In 2012, Stanford University researchers found strong correlations between time spent in front of screens and poor emotional and social health. They surveyed 3,461 girls from the ages of 8 to 12.
Perhaps that is why Apple simultaneously premiered its new iOS “tech addiction tool” during the same conference.
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