What is emoji?
The etymology of the word “emoji” is a fusion of the Japanese words for “picture” (e-) and “character” (moji), and they are the small graphics that texters, tweeters, and e-mailers around the world are using to enhance the emotive value of the messages they send.
The first incarnation of these little icons came in the form of emoticons, a much simpler version that uses the colon, parenthesis, hyphen, and semi-colon in various configurations to make little smiley faces. These first renderings were originally used in 1982 at Carnegie Mellon University, by the computer science staff who noticed that when bantering back and forth on online message boards, their jokes failed to translate. According to the Time magazine article “Not Just a Smiley Face”, Research Professor Scott Fahlman suggested, that misunderstandings of message interpretation could be avoided, by using the keyboard’s punctuation marks in various configurations (Steinmetz). The idea caught on, and before long emoticons were gracing messages everywhere!
Flash forward seventeen years to 1999, when the Japanese telecommunication company NTT Docomo was looking for a way to compete with other pager service providers in a very tight market. Shigetaka Kurita, one of the company’s employees, had the genius idea of adding simplistic cartoon images to the company’s messaging functions as a way to attract the younger teen market. Kurita set to work designing by hand drawings on a 12-by-12 pixel grid, taking inspiration from pictorial Japanese sources including Japanese comic books (manga) and Japanese characters from written Chinese (kanji), from which, he took the ability to express abstract ideas like “secret” and “love” in a single character (Blagdon).
In an interview for The Verge magazine in 2013 Kurita said,
“In Japanese comics, there are a lot of different symbols. People draw expressions like the person with the bead of sweat, you know, or like, when someone gets an idea and they have the lightbulb. So there were a lot of cases where I used those as a kind of hint and rearranged things.” (Blagdon)
The result of his efforts were 176 simplistic little pictures that ranged from smiley faces to music notes.
Kurita took his drawings to industry giants Fujitsu and Panasonic, who implemented his designs without any alterations, Kurita says, “[T]he good thing about that was that everyone’s emoji were identical. If each manufacturer had added its own originality to the characters, the emoji would have been all mixed up and inconsistent, even inside Docomo.” (Blagdon)
Unfortunately the consistency did not last, and because Docomo could not copyright the original designs other communication companies added their own emojis, resulting in a jumbled mass of images that were incompatible with competitor’s devices.
The first incarnation of these little icons came in the form of emoticons, a much simpler version that uses the colon, parenthesis, hyphen, and semi-colon in various configurations to make little smiley faces. These first renderings were originally used in 1982 at Carnegie Mellon University, by the computer science staff who noticed that when bantering back and forth on online message boards, their jokes failed to translate. According to the Time magazine article “Not Just a Smiley Face”, Research Professor Scott Fahlman suggested, that misunderstandings of message interpretation could be avoided, by using the keyboard’s punctuation marks in various configurations (Steinmetz). The idea caught on, and before long emoticons were gracing messages everywhere!
Flash forward seventeen years to 1999, when the Japanese telecommunication company NTT Docomo was looking for a way to compete with other pager service providers in a very tight market. Shigetaka Kurita, one of the company’s employees, had the genius idea of adding simplistic cartoon images to the company’s messaging functions as a way to attract the younger teen market. Kurita set to work designing by hand drawings on a 12-by-12 pixel grid, taking inspiration from pictorial Japanese sources including Japanese comic books (manga) and Japanese characters from written Chinese (kanji), from which, he took the ability to express abstract ideas like “secret” and “love” in a single character (Blagdon).
In an interview for The Verge magazine in 2013 Kurita said,
“In Japanese comics, there are a lot of different symbols. People draw expressions like the person with the bead of sweat, you know, or like, when someone gets an idea and they have the lightbulb. So there were a lot of cases where I used those as a kind of hint and rearranged things.” (Blagdon)
The result of his efforts were 176 simplistic little pictures that ranged from smiley faces to music notes.
Kurita took his drawings to industry giants Fujitsu and Panasonic, who implemented his designs without any alterations, Kurita says, “[T]he good thing about that was that everyone’s emoji were identical. If each manufacturer had added its own originality to the characters, the emoji would have been all mixed up and inconsistent, even inside Docomo.” (Blagdon)
Unfortunately the consistency did not last, and because Docomo could not copyright the original designs other communication companies added their own emojis, resulting in a jumbled mass of images that were incompatible with competitor’s devices.
How did it start?
Originally the emojis were only available in Japan. In fact, when Kurita invented the first emojis, only one half of U.S. households had a computer (Steinmetz).
Things changed in 2007 however, when Apple launched the first I-phone. The global smartphone market boomed, and both Apple and Google realized that in order to crack the vital Japanese market they would have to include emojis into their operating system (Steinmetz). Apple did this by burying the Japanese emoji keyboard in the I-Phone—where no-one else could find it, or so they thought!
Eventually, the North American market heard about the emoji phenomena in Japan, and before long the savviest of the techno-geeks discovered how to crack open the emoji keyboard—the rest is pretty much history.
Since 2011, every Smartphone operating system: Apple, Android etc. has its own version of the emoji keyboard openly accessible to its users.
Unlike emoticons, emoji are programmed strings of “code” (Unicode), which is an international programming standard and allows different operating systems synchronicity. The Unicode Consortium, a U.S. based non-profit organization, whose members include Apple, Google, Microsoft etc. approved the first set of internationally standard emojis, and as of summer 2014 Unicode approved a new set of 250 emojis. However, these “new” emojis are mainly translations of pre-existing fonts known as Webdings, and Wingdings (Sterbergh).
Things changed in 2007 however, when Apple launched the first I-phone. The global smartphone market boomed, and both Apple and Google realized that in order to crack the vital Japanese market they would have to include emojis into their operating system (Steinmetz). Apple did this by burying the Japanese emoji keyboard in the I-Phone—where no-one else could find it, or so they thought!
Eventually, the North American market heard about the emoji phenomena in Japan, and before long the savviest of the techno-geeks discovered how to crack open the emoji keyboard—the rest is pretty much history.
Since 2011, every Smartphone operating system: Apple, Android etc. has its own version of the emoji keyboard openly accessible to its users.
Unlike emoticons, emoji are programmed strings of “code” (Unicode), which is an international programming standard and allows different operating systems synchronicity. The Unicode Consortium, a U.S. based non-profit organization, whose members include Apple, Google, Microsoft etc. approved the first set of internationally standard emojis, and as of summer 2014 Unicode approved a new set of 250 emojis. However, these “new” emojis are mainly translations of pre-existing fonts known as Webdings, and Wingdings (Sterbergh).
Who is using emoji?
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The simple answer is, most people. The website www.emojitracker.com can tell you exactly which, and how many emojis are being used on Twitter in real time. The most popular emojis are the Joy and the Heart emoji, which is comforting to know! Worryingly however, according to the New York Times article “Smile, Your Speaking Emoji: the rapid evolution of a wordless tongue”, by Adam Sternbergh, “Recruiters for ISIS are using emojis in their friendly-sounding tweets.”
Furthermore, a 2012 Pew Research Internet survey reported that: “The typical American teen is sending and receiving a greater number of texts than in 2009. Overall, 75% of all teens text. This far surpasses the frequency with which they pick other forms of daily communication, including face-to-face.“ (Lenhart) Whilst their findings do not show how many teens use emojis in their texts, it is highly likely that they do. |