THE EMPIRE
The emoji has rapidly become part of everyday use within text messaging, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram and any other social media outlet you can name to liven up communication between users. Before we get to the modern day use, let’s have a history lesson.
Emoji is of Japanese origin, created in 1998 for mobile phones by Kurita Shigetaka, an employee for NTT DoCoMo, a large Japanese mobile communication company. Kurita had intended the emoji for a more simplified and shorter form of communication, rather than using the long polite phrases and expressions that are very common in the Japanese culture. This idea lead to 176 12×12 pixel character creations for the worlds first internet mobile platform known as i-mode.
Though mostly used to convey one’s emotions in the modern day, emoji has no literal connection to emotion. The word emoji in a literal sense means “picture character”, coming from 絵 (e) meaning picture and 文字 (Moji) which means character. You may also think emoji and emoticon are the same, well they’re not despite being used in the same way. Emoji is code that is pre-programmed to turn into a picture, while emoticon is the the smiley faces that were made with with symbols and characters you would find on keyboards. Emoticons were first on the electronic communication scene being created in 1982 by Scott Fahlman.
You can’t really go a day without seeing someone use an emoji in social media unless you’re a hermit with no internet. In Katy Perry’s lyric video of Roar, many of the words on that appeared were replaced with emoji. Perhaps the biggest impact emoji has had on the world was in 2015 when the Oxford Dictionaries chose “Face with tears of joy” as it’s word of the year. Yes, a pictograph beat out any other word for word of the year. Thank god because “fleek” was on the shortlist.
How often are emoji’s used in your day-to-day life? Use them in Snapchat? I bet you use this “Face with tears of joy” emoji when you mention your friend in a meme or when you reply to them because who doesn’t do that. Well I don’t actually.
Unicode U+1F602
– Hayden
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