A Day Dedicated To Emojis
Can you imagine having hours of online conversation without emojis? Here’s a day dedicated entirely to emojis, World Emoji Day which falls on the 17th of July.
Since the unfolding of the online era, emojis have been an integral part of communication. May it be text messaging, chat conversations in any online platform, and even email marketing, emojis are being used to better convey the emotions intended to express in a statement. The use of emojis purposely avoids miscommunication which may arise from the bland texts being sent across platforms and have been considered a game changer in cyberspace.
We know them and use them, but where did emojis really come from?
Before, there were only emoticons such as the :-) and :-( and 8-D in chatroom conversations in the 1990s. These combinations of symbols represented an important part of early netspeak. The first set of emojis were created in 1999 by Japanese artist Shigetaka Kurita, who worked on the development team for “i-mode,” an early mobile internet platform from Japan’s main mobile carrier, DOCOMO. He envisioned an attractive interface to relay information in a concise way: for example, an icon to show the weather forecast rather than spelling out “cloudy.” So Kurita sketched a set of 12- by 12-pixel images that could be selected from a keyboard-like grid within the i-mode interface, then sent on mobiles and pages as their own individual characters. Kurita’s original 176 emojis, now part of the permanent collection at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, prefered symbols over faces, because DOCOMO’s goal was to find new ways to express information. There were characters to show the weather (sun, clouds, umbrella, snowman), traffic (car, tram, airplane, ship), technology (landline, cell phone, TV, GameBoy), and all the phases of the moon. But those characters were not entirely informational. For the first time, emojis offered a way to add emotional subtext to a message. The word “okay” might sound passive on its own, but add a ♥ and the message would show a sense of warmth. It was indeed the beginning of a new visual language.
Since its creation, emojis had been available outside Japan in the early 2000s, and had been officially adopted by Unicode in 2010 which paved the way in adding hundreds to the collection like happiness, anger, cat faces, careers, and a whole lot more. In 2015, emojis got a diversity updating with five new skin tones and a set of same-sex couples, then added single dad, pride flag, and weightlifting woman in 2016. Throughout its development, flags of countries had been gradually added and more emoji proposals were being recognized to adapt with the changes in our society.
However, emoji characters have limitations as they vary slightly between platforms within the limits in meaning defined by the Unicode specification, as companies have tried to provide artistic presentations of ideas and objects. For example, following an Apple tradition, the calendar emoji on Apple products always shows July 17, the date in 2002 Apple announced its iCal calendar application for macOS while android phones and other devices would show a different date or no specific date at all. The calendar emoji led some Apple product users to initially nickname July 17 "World Emoji Day", which was later recognized and celebrated internationally.
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Alongside the convenience brought about by the existence and use of emojis, the interpretation of certain emojis were mistakenly perceived to be illegal. For example, the use of bomb and pistol emoji resulted in hundreds of arrests as they were considered threats, while the eggplant and peach emojis were utilized to represent penis and buttocks that suggested solicitation of sexual favors. As opinions and interpretations deem to be ambiguous, there is no denying how emojis have helped develop the digital language which keeps on evolving throughout the years.