Emoticons:
- Origins go back to late 1990s when ingenious innovators in Japan started to experiment with a whole new system of electronic expression
- Before emojis there were emoticons – rough approximations of facial expressions made using standard characters on a keyboard
- These have been with us a lot longer than many might imagine – in the 1960s, Vladimir Nabokov (author of Lolita and other landmark novels) said ‘I often think there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile – some sort of concave mark, a supine round bracket.’
- Fast forward to 1982, and American computer scientist Scott Fahlman originated and popularised the first emoticons as we know them today, he suggested they be used as ‘joke markers’ so people’s tones wouldn’t be misunderstood on early computer network bulletin boards
Origins of Emojis:
- Emojis didn’t naturally or directly evolve from emoticons – emoticons originated among computer scientists in the United States and is a contraction of ‘emotion icon’ whereas emojis were born in Japan and stemmed from the Japanese word for ‘picture’ and ‘character’
- Emojis were pioneered on an early mobile phone released by Japanese company J-Phone in 1997 – this phone, the SkyWalker DP-211SW, came loaded with 90 examples of emojis
- However, that phone didn’t really sell widely, so this was not the start of the age of the emoji, and as the identities of the designers behind these early J-Phone pictographs remain obscure, the historical limelight has instead fallen squarely on Shigetaka Kurita, the man who really set the emoji train in motion
- In the late 90s, while working at another Japanese telecommunications company called NTT Docomo, Kurita became involved in the launch of an innovative mobile internet platform called i-mode – the service would allow users to access emails, news bulletins, weather forecasts and games on their mobile devices, and Kurita thought it would be beneficial to offer a series of images users could send as a form of shorthand
- He came up with 176 images which were regarded as the first emojis to truly ‘take off’ and set us on the path to the emoji-filled world we inhabit today (the original set has been added to the collection at New York’s Museum of Modern Art)
Development:
- Only a few of Kurita’s emojis depicted facial expressions – most of his set was given over to symbols relating to sport, the weather, and the like because it was primarily intended as a way for users to quickly convey tangible information to others, rather than garnish their texts with quirky signifiers of mood and emotion
- But as i-mode took off and emojis became hugely popular in Japan, things slowly evolved
- Soon the likes of Apple and Google began to incorporate emojis into their operating systems
- The Unicode Consortium – a regulatory body which standardises how text is represented across different software platforms – officially recognised emoji characters in 2010, heralding a massive, global rise in emoji use
- Since then, emojis have become important enough to attract their share of controversy and critical debate – e.g. headlines were made when major tech companies like Google, Facebook and Apple decided to replace the realistic gun emoji with a cartoonish water pistol emoji – a reaction to widespread anxieties about school shootings and gun violence in general
- There has also been much discussion about how to improve diversity and inclusivity in the world of emojis – both in terms of representing different ethnic backgrounds and also having a fair spread of cultural signifiers, such as foods from across the world