Thursday, March 30, 2023

Emojis and their History

 

Sure these emoticons were basic but they were a step in the direction that we see emojis today. In 1999 a Japanese artist by the name of Shigetaka Kurita created the first emojis with his team at “I-Mode”. These emojis were made to help portray emotion and have simple and easy ways to communicate with one another over the phone. Kurita ended up making 176 emojis in their entirety and they now sit in the Museum of modern art in New York and are viewed by thousands of people daily. 

Emoticons and emojis have had a very long and robust history, even though you may think of emojis as a more recent thing in the timeline of history emoticons were actually used in 1862. When President Lincoln was giving a speech and in the transcript written by the New York Times the emoticon ;)  was used. Whether that was a mistake or the first use of emoticons is heavily debated. Going ahead to 1963 Harvey Ball invents the smiley face :) which was a staple of “Hippie Culture” In the ‘60s and ‘70s.  

After that, many companies try to mimic and recreate the emojis that Kurita created in Japan only but eventually moved to the United States through both Google and Apple. Both those companies created their own emojis to start the competition in the States for better quality and more versatile emojis. 

Emojis have changed communication forever and there have been multiple things that have allowed people to use emojis more casually and use emojis in more ways such as the Emoji adaptation of Moby Dick, the book was written completely in emojis and which was a very big breakthrough because it showed that emojis could be so complex and be able to communicate so much information, even to the point of writing a whole book in emojis.  

In 2009 two coders from Apple requested that 625 new emoji characters be put into the Unicode Standard, which was later approved in 2010. Those 625 new emojis were now easily accessible to all phone users. This choice to add the emojis to the Unicode standard made two things clear, that emojis were too mainstream for the major tech companies not to include them in their text/chat messengers anymore and that emojis were on their way to being their own “language”. 

When you look at emojis today, they are an everyday part of conversations and texts and have affected how we communicate.  There have been many emojis that have even taken the place of words and emotions in our text conversations. Things such as 👍(yes) , 🔥(fire/awesome) ,and 🤷(I don't know). Those simple emojis can replace whole sentences and get an idea or emotion out in just one click of a button.  

When you think of emojis you can associate them with my generation (Gen Z) because of how much our age group uses them and they were first popularized during our generation as well. 74% of people in the US regularly use stickers, or emoticons in their online communications, sending an average of 96 emoticons or stickers per day. That number will only go up as technology advances and continues to grow in the modern age.

Emojis have been a huge part of the history of communication and instant messaging even being named the word of the year in 2015.  Our generation understands that a picture is worth a thousand words and emojis are the pictures of instant messaging and they can communicate so much information 


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