Emojis and the Rogers diffusion of innovation

 Emojis are a pivotal part of communication today but there have been things that have come and combated emojis throughout the years. All things go and follow the Rogers diffusion of innovation and ideas timeline and I think that emojis follow that timeline perfectly. 

First, you have the pioneers the first pioneer of emojis both through the creation and usage of emojis was Shigetaka Kurita. He created the first 176 emojis and started off the timeline for emojis in the world. These emojis were very experimental and very simple because Kurita didn't want to create complex emojis if they were not going to be popular or used in the future so he kept them simple and they began to be used more prevalently after their release to the public. 

Many people around Japan began to use these emojis because they were released into the Japanese cell phone programs,  while they were released directly into the phones, a lot of people were hesitant to use them due to the fact that others would not understand exactly what they were saying. Over time they grew in popularity and had a huge uptake in Japan.

But over time they gained popularity enough popularity for Tech producers in the states to be the late majority of adopting emojis. 2014 when emojis begin to become more prevalent in the United States it restarted the cycle all over again and Over the span of 6 months there were Pioneers early adapters and eventually as one New York Times writer said “Eventually I was replacing words with characters, adding a series of flexing biceps to the encouraging “you can do it!” text. Then one day I spent a full 10 minutes obsessing over the perfect way to say “I’m a writer.”. This really shows that even journalists for the New York Times were adopting and using emojis in their day-to-day lives and how much there was an early majority uptake in the states when it came to emoji usage. 

There have been many things that have come to combat emojis such as apples introduction to stickers through their text messaging and Snapchat using bitmojis to portray emotions or events that may happen. Now these things are super cool they really haven't provided any super big competition to emojis and I feel as if emojis haven't really lost any usage over the years ever since 2014 when they started being used in the States.