Encountering emojis on a regular basis in the 21st Century, tech-savvy lifestyle we live today is a given, however, what is the history of emojis?
Emoji’s started as a simple idea to allow people to express their emotions through text message without actually having to say “this makes me happy” or “this makes me angry”. Instead, you now can just say, “I met with friends”, and insert a smiley emoji face and whoever you are texting will know you are happy you went for the outing. It has become such an integral part of texting conversations and expression, it is hard to imagine a world without them.
Emoticons are expressions and faces created with basic characters from your keyboard and were the forerunner of emojis that are real images and symbols which are rendered on devices.
The popularity of emojis around the globe is only growing. Emojis are not only changing the way we express ourselves through text, but also expanding the way we communicate. People and companies are having to adapt to this new way of thinking and talking in order to stay up to date in this new communicative world.
Emojis can also be understood by everyone as they have no language boundaries. When you send someone a smiley face, it is quite obvious what the meaning is behind it regardless whether you are Mexican or Moroccan.
As the 20th century drew to a close, Japanese mobile phone companies were under increasing pressure to support Japanese users’ obsession with images. They began to embark on a trend where many picture messages were exchanged by their Japanese client base so instead of just ignoring this and focusing on how they could charge their customers more money, these Japanese mobile phone companies gave their users more of what they wanted.
In the late 1990s, Shigetaku Kurita, a young engineer at the Japanese phone company NTT Docomo, was working on what he thought was just another project – a series of icons that subscribers could use to quickly read information on the first mobile web services and to communicate with each other. This set of 176 icons was called emoji, a combination of the Japanese words for picture “e” and character “moji”.
However, it developed and spread like wildfire and various emojis from food to animals were designed.
We are so fascinated by these icons there was even recently a movie made about them.
Before we could wave, clap and flip someone off in six different skin tones, emojis were just yellow. Simpsons yellow. This default, universal cartoon “skin” was based off of Caucasian skin tones.
In 2015, Unicode took its first big step toward diversifying emoji by introducing the option to change the skin tone on people emoji, along with additions to include more types of people doing more types of things. Since then, every update has included incremental steps toward diversifying the types of people and cultures represented on the emoji keyboard – female surfers and cyclists, women with hard hats and stethoscopes, people wearing turbans and hijabs. Most recently, Unicode has taken steps toward creating gender neutral emojis, and other symbols to represent the full spectrum of emoji users.
