Yesterday, July 17 was Emoji Day. So I decided to write about it. July 17 is marked as emoji day because Apple calendar emoji has the same date mentioned on it.
From cave paintings to emoji — we have come a long way. With every passing day, as we evolve new emojis are introduced. Emojis are the future of language and semiotics. Much like punctuations, emoji’s have made the conversations hasslefree. Well, thinking about conversation without emoji is difficult for us. Emoji makes the conversation interesting and helps us to express ourselves.
In the beginning, there were emoticons — :-) and :-( and :-P. For the most part, they were used in chat rooms in the 1990s. The first emoji was created by Japanese artist Shigetaka Kurita in 1999. Kurita wanted to design an attractive interface to convey information in a simple way. So Kurita sketched 12-by-12 pixel images that could be selected from the keyboard-like grid and then sent on to mobile and pages. Kurita’s original 176 emoji’s — now part of the permanent collection of the New York Museum of Modern Art — had symbols to characterise emotions, weather, traffic, technology and phases of the moon. As of March 2020, Unicode Consortium — which acts as the UN for text and signs — has approved 3304 emojis. Now more than 92 percent of the people online use emoji, and one-third use on a daily basis. This trend of emoji began when Apple added emojis to iOS keyboard in 2008. Two years later, Android also unveiled an emoji keyboard.
Meanwhile, the language of texting changed. In 2015, Oxford Dictionary crowned “Face with Tears of Joy” as the word of the year. This was the first time that an emoji became a linguistic champion. Meanwhile All the emojis are pixels of information. Emoji roots from the Japanese word “e” which means picture and “moji” which means character. Essentially, the emojis are images designed to narrate a story.
Every year designers submit new emojis to the Unicode Consortium which are properly testified before being rolled out. The fundamental improvement in the emoji vocabulary is based on the incorporation of culture of underrepresented communities. As these emojis come up we understand something about the cultural priorities and types of people who are included in forming this digital growing age. Anyone can submit a proposal to add a new emoji. Unicode asks for proper documentation, an explanation of why and how people will use it.
Text is the most powerful, go-to communication tool. Emojis are the upgrade.