Emoji are
more than just smiley faces.
Trillions are
exchanged in text messages, on social media, and in networking apps each year.
Though
emoji have become commonplace, we’re only starting to understand their
communicative possibilities. Those cute little images serve as a powerful form
of shorthand, and can be used as a tool to evaluate how we relate to each other
in the digital age. They also convey emotions in a way that words sometimes
can’t.
3,019: Emoji in the Unicode Standard as of March 2019
5 billion: Emoji sent daily on Facebook Messenger
92%: Share of all people online who use emoji
>50%: Share of Instagram posts that contain emoji
A 2016 study found that people who rated
themselves as agreeable were more likely to use emoji on social media sites.
The study also found that people who commonly used emoji were more socially
receptive and empathetic. Researchers in Colombia found the use of emoji faces
produces neural responses similar to those observed in face-to-face
communication.
In 1999, 25-year-old Japanese designer
Shigetaka Kurita designed the first set of emoji for Japan’s main mobile
carrier, NTT DOCOMO, drawing inspiratio from manga, Chinese characters,
and international signs for bathrooms. Soon after, other companies started to
take notice.
In 2007, a team from Google led a petition
to get emoji recognized by the Unicode Consortium, a nonprofit organization
that maintains text standards across computers. In 2009, Apple engineers Yasuo
Kida and Peter Edberg joined in and submitted an official proposal to adopt 625
new emoji characters into the Unicode Standard. Unicode finally accepted the
proposal in 2010, paving the way to make emoji accessible everywhere.
As
prevalent as they are, emoji can get lost in translation. Depending on the
device and the carrier they may appear as empty boxes or question marks, as a
different visual, or not at all. And that’s because not all emoji that exist in
the Unicode are available everywhere. Unicode sets the emoji symbols, but it’s
up to Apple, Google, Microsoft, Samsung, and other owners of operating systems
to update operating systems accordingly. (Emojipedia is a useful resource to see how
emoji translate across different platforms.)
Emoji are not an actual language since emoji have no
grammar and cannot be combined into more complex units of meaning.. Still,
emoji help provide nuance and context to messages, as we convey meaning not
only with words but also with gestures and facial expressions.
Linguist Gretchen Mcculloch compares them to
gesticulatin and says that, for children, they may be a useful precursor to
reading. He adds that claiming that Emoji will make us poorer communicators is
like saying that using facial expressions in conversation makes your ideas more
difficult to understand.
“After millennia of painful improvement, from illiteracy to Shakespeare and beyond, humanity is rushing to throw it all away. We’re heading back to ancient Egyptian times, next stop the stone age, with a big yellow smile on our faces.”Art and design critic Jonathan Jones
