Born from a Japanese tech arms race and immortalized in Fred Benenson’s 2009 masterwork “Emoji Dick,” the emoji has become a staple of the way we communicate. Such that the Oxford dictionary named the cry-laugh emoji its word of the year in 2015. Whether you’d like to convey complex feelings such as “pweeeese” or embellish the end of a dry text message, it’s rare that these little symbols would not make at least one appearance in our daily text conversations. And, like most internet artifacts, early adopters of the emoji believed it had the potential to completely collapse the barriers of language and finally realize McLuhan’s predictions of a “global village.” But is that really so? In this finale episode Hannah and Maia discuss the history of the emoji and all its supposed utopian potential. Tangents include: the unasked-for details of Hannah and Maia’s long-awaited reunion, Canadian mennonite literature, and Hannah’s own personal version of the internet, the Web 1.5.

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