Paola Saint Hilaire
Professor Brucker Cohen
MCS 244
20 May, 2019
The History of Emojis
Have you ever heard the saying, “an emoji is worth a thousand words”, no? Well you should start getting used to it because that is becoming a reality in this generation with the boom of emojis that are popping up on almost all of our devices in this day in age. While we do use emojis in any conversation or status we post anywhere on our cellphones, tablets, and now computers we never learned where emojis really came from. Emojis were created by japanese designer Shigetaka Kurita in 1998 as a way to help others communicate better. According to rd.com “Shigetaka Kurita, an engineer at the Japanese phone company, NTT Docomo. He was working on a way for customers to communicate through icons. The result was a set of 176 icons he called emoji. The name combines two Japanese words: “e” (picture) and “moji” (character).” little did anyone know how popular emojis were going to become and how accurate his expected way of use was going to be today. Emojis have taken over and created a drastic change on how we communicate to others. This creation has opened doors on many different social platforms as a way to converse with others without having to use words or to add on to whatever we may say.
When created the emoji, Shigetaka Kurita had a difficult time drawing out his ideas on limited resources. Mentioned in the CNN.com article, “When Shigetaka Kurita created the first emoji in 1998, he had to work within a grid measuring 12 by 12 pixels.That’s a total of 144 dots, or 18 bytes of data, meaning that the Japanese designer’s complete set of 176 pictograms took up just over 3 kilobytes” because of this, Kurita’s early emojis were very blocky and pixelated. It wasn’t until 2010 when google petitioned to get emojis recognized by Unicode, the standard that governs the software coding of text that big changes were made not only to Kurita’s life but ours as well as it was the start of emojis on apple and android devices. As mentioned in wired.com, “Unicode accepted that proposal in 2010, in a move that would soon make emoji accessible everywhere. Unicode ultimately decided to index emoji “because of their use as characters for text-messaging in a number of Japanese manufacturers’ corporate standards.” In other words: Emoji had become too popular to ignore. Unicode’s blessing wasn’t just a way to maintain standards for the evolving lexicon of emoji—it was the beginning of legitimizing emoji as a form of communication. Now emoji were officially on their way to becoming a language.” this shows how we are making a change in the way we communicate with each other. It gives its users a wider range of communicating with others in a variety of different ways.
Today, emojis are used as a form of communication in our daily lives. According to, an article on wired.com “Emoji quickly became popular in Japan, as rival mobile companies copied DOCOMO’s idea. And as mobile computing continued to explode throughout the mid-2000s, companies outside Japan, like Apple, saw an opportunity to incorporate emoji on other platforms.” with this we have seen how other companies such as Apple have taken the idea of emojis which was introduced to their products in 2012 during their IOS 6 release and have introduced their own form of emoji called the animoji and memoji released on IOS 12. Apple has taken the emoji idea to a whole new level. Today, if you own a IPhone X you can create your own avatar or use a small range of emojis that tracks your facial movements. With this you’ll be able to send photos and video to others using your own choice of animoji or memoji. We see how emojis has changed the common form of communication. With them we are able to add more into our messages and have a new way to make our conversations more fun. According to wired.com, “As emoji became more popular, they also became more plentiful. The Unicode Consortium added new emoji to its approved list each year, gathered from users around the world: the first emoji bride, dozens of plants and animals, types of food, and depictions of all kinds of activities. Unicode requires a lengthy submission and approval process for every new batch hoping for christening, and it can take up to two years for an emoji to travel from first draft to your phone.” this shows that the creation of new emojis will not stop, it has already made its place into our daily use of things that can’t go unused throughout the day. The constant add-ons makes sure that emojis will be available and used for a long time coming.
Although we do see the ways in which emojis have changed our lives for the better, there are some issues that may become present. According to psychologistworld.com “Conversing online or through text messages has led to the loss of important elements in human communication. A face-to-face conversation involves verbal communication, whose meaning can be affected by a person’s tone of voice. Intonation, volume and the stress placed on particular words can change the recipient’s interpretation of a statement completely. Even non-verbal signals, known as body language, can alter or reinforce a person’s message.” creations like these can cause many of us to disconnect more from the real world. We’re already losing real life connections due to our cell phones, now imagine the damage that is being caused due to emojis which is resulting in us using it as another form of instant communication. Today, you can easily reply to ones message simply by sending them an emoji, I know im ones of those people. I’ve asked and told my parents for things just by simply sending them an emoji. It has gotten to the point where we’re all just becoming lazier than ever. Similar to the Disney film Wall-e we can see how technology has created a drastic change in society. All citizens became obese and were so depended on their technological devices. When things like these are created, we tend to become more connected and involved to our phones, it takes time to out our devices down and actually speak to others and do things for ourselves because technology has been making things easier for us all in every way possible.
The ways in which emojis have changed the world is by giving technology users all around the world a chance to connect without the use of words. It has started a new wave of simple communication. According to Bustle.com “With the skyrocketing popularity, it wasn’t long before emoji made their way to Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and more.” with this we see how emojis have been incorporated into our daily lives. It has become a part of our use of not only technology but social media. Emojis have become so popular in our culture that its popularity has resulted in films such as The Emoji Movie and items such as emoji pillows, pijamas, and more. It tends to cater more to the younger generation because they grew up having emojis on items such as their tablets and cellphones. In the future I believe emojis will still be popular and will continue to grow. I Expect the amount of emojis to triple if not more and become a bigger empire than it already is, it will continue to be used by millions all around the world.
With the power of emojis, I expect that in the future emojis will become a new language to us. As mentions in This.com “According to Dr Brown, emoji is just one aspect of visual communication that will become increasingly sophisticated. ‘We’re moving towards use of audio visual, GIFs, stickers and emojis in our device-based conversations,’ he says. He believes this is driven by social media personas and the need to have a voice or presence that stands out, so it’s certainly likely that we’ll see many more emojis in time. As the library of symbols grows, so does our ability to say more complex things. ‘The more media tools we’re presented with, the more personalised they get,’ Dr Brown says, and concludes, ‘So we might end up with personalised emojis, perhaps even with our own faces on them.’ in the upcoming generations, people will grow knowing a new language produced of the work of technology. The emoji language helps us generate a sensory experience. It helps us get around tone so that certain emojis can have the power to give clear intentions so that the person on the other end can have a better connection and understanding as to what is being said and how its being said. Overall, emojis had the power to make a change in the way we communicate. It has resulted into a new world that gives us the chance to become more creative in the way we interact via our devices. As the years go by, I believe we will have more inventions that’ll become more useful than emoji but as we see today, emojis have planted a seed that will some grow into major ideas in the next upcoming years.
Sources
Grant, Megan. “A Brief History Of Emoji.” Bustle, Bustle, 31 Jan. 2019, www.bustle.com/articles/152580-where-did-emoji-come-from-heres-a-brief-history-of-everyones-favorite-pictograms-video.
Nowak, Claire. “Why Do We Use Emojis Anyway? A Fascinating History of Emoticons.” Reader’s Digest, Reader’s Digest, 7 Dec. 2016, www.rd.com/culture/history-of-emoji/.
Pardes, Arielle. “The Complete History of Emoji.” Wired, Conde Nast, 7 Feb. 2019, www.wired.com/story/guide-emoji/.
Crispo, Jacopo. “Shigetaka Kurita: The Man Who Invented Emoji.” CNN, Cable News Network, 23 May 2018, www.cnn.com/style/article/emoji-shigetaka-kurita-standards-manual/index.html.
Waude, Adam. “Emoting With Emoticons: How Emoticons Influence Emotional Communication.” Psychologist World, 29 Apr. 2016, www.psychologistworld.com/emotion/emoticons-emojis-emotion-psychology.
“The Enduring Charm of Bowie.” This., 10 Apr. 2018, this.deakin.edu.au/society/the-enduring-charm-of-bowie.
1 comments
Great work on this and tracing emojis all the way back to NTT DOCOMO which is a cell phone service I remember in the 1990s. I think that customize-able ani-mojiis will be big hit in the future as perhaps every cellphone user will have their own version of one to use on various calls and other applications. Good work this semester!