Today is the fifth World Emoji Day โ a day to celebrate the tiny images on our phones that have transformed the way people chat online. Here are some things you need to know about those funny little pictures ๐:
Why today?
The date was fixed on 17 July because if you peek at the emojis on your Apple or Android phone, youโll see that is the date on display on the calendar emoji (๐ ). The origin of that date is that Apple first used it in its symbol to commemorate the date the Macโs iCal feature was first announced.
Emojis have been around since 1999
Invented by Shigetaka Kurita, the ability to send a heart symbol on early Japanese pagers is the source of all emojis. Kurita drew inspiration from marks used in weather forecasts and from kanji characters to design a set of 176 symbols that covered a range of human emotions and activities that could be used on phones in 1999. The rest is history.
โAt first we were just designing for the Japanese market,โ says Kurita. โI didnโt assume that emoji would spread and become so popular internationally. Iโm surprised at how widespread they have become. Then again, they are universal, so they are useful communication tools that transcend language.โ
Thereโs an awful lot more of them now
Unicode, which oversees what is allowed to become an emoji, currently lists 1644 emojis, including smileys, people, sport, food, animals, flags and a myriad of other categories.
And we also send them a lot
Facebook has stated that every day on Facebook Messenger 900m responses sent consist of just emojis. It also says 700m emojis are included in posts on Facebook every day. The most popular emoji on Facebook in the UK is the โface with Tears of Joyโ or โcrying laughingโ emoji ๐ - indeed English Oxford Dictionaries made it their word of the year in 2015.
Although you have to be careful when you deploy it:
On #WorldEmojiDay - a shoutout to my Mum, whoโs only just started using them and sent a ๐ to her friend whoโs dog just died ๐ณ
โ Tony Shepherd (@tonysheps) July 17, 2018
Emojis only became racially diverse in 2015
In 2014, Unicode proposed adding five different skin tones to the character set, allowing people to send messages that reflect how they look.
Since then there have been further efforts to improve the representation of people in the character set. In 2016, Google pushed to include emojis that showed women working in fields like engineering, chemistry, plumbing and farming. Apple has used this yearโs #WorldEmojiDay to announce some updates to the set available on its phones, including โmore hair options to better represent people with red hair, grey hair and curly hairโ plus a new emoji for bald people.
The original emojis ended up in MoMA
Gifted by the Nippon Telegraph and Telephone company in 2016, New Yorkโs Museum of Modern Art acquired the 176 original 12-by-12 pixel designs for the original set of emojis, displaying them alongside its modern and expanded equivalents.
โEmojis as a concept go back in the centuries to ideograms, hieroglyphics, and other graphic characters, enabling us to draw this beautiful arch that covers all of human history,โ said Paola Antonelli, senior curator of the museumโs department of architecture and design. โThere is nothing more modern than timeless concepts such as these.โ
They have a weird unexpected use on Wikipedia
For reasons best known to nerdy developers, you can actually use emojis in Wikipedia URLs. Yes, honestly. If, for example, you type http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/๐ into your address bar, youโll be redirected to the Wikipedia page for cats. Useful.
The Met Office definitely knows how to use them
#WorldEmojiDay
โ Met Office (@metoffice) July 17, 2018
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Emojis adopted strict gun control
In recent years the gun emoji has fallen out of favour, to be replaced by the water pistol. The #DisarmTheiPhone campaign in 2015 put pressure on Apple to make the change, saying that disarming the phone in your pocket would show that Americans wanted tighter gun control. While that might be a tenuous claim, the campaign was successful. Google was the last of the major platforms to make this change โ finally following suit in 2018.
Although this lot maybe didnโt get the memo:
Happy #WorldEmojiDay from the #USArmy. pic.twitter.com/Qx5gOFxm4u
โ U.S. Army (@USArmy) July 17, 2018
The emoji-only social network dream
With their use primarily evolving on social networks, there have been several attempts to start social messaging apps that focus exclusively on emojis. Perhaps the most extreme was Emojli, launched in 2014 by UK developers Matt Gray and Tom Scott, where even the usernames had to be emojis.
You can read a decent emoji-only novel
At least in translation, anyway. In 2013 the Library of Congress accepted into its collection an emoji-only translation of Herman Melvilleโs Moby Dick. A project overseen by Fred Benenson, library recommending officer Michael Neubert said: โWhat is striking about this work is that it takes a known classic of literature and converts it to a construct of our modern way of communicating, making possible an investigation of the question, โis it still a literary classic when written in a kind of smartphone-based pidgin language?โโ
Although whether โ๏ธ๐จโต๐ณ๐ really has the same impact over time as Melvilleโs opening line โCall me Ishmaelโ remains to be seen.
The Emoji Movie still made money
Despite being critically panned, winning four Razzies including worst movie, worst screenplay, worst director, and worst screen combo, and at one point having an accumulated rating of 0% on Rotten Tomatoes, depressingly the Emoji Movie still grossed over $200m (ยฃ152m). ๐ฉ
Emojis in the workplace arenโt always fun
According to the trade union Unite, in 2017 employees of Sports Direct were being asked to press a touchpad featuring a happy or sad face emoji to indicate whether they were satisfied with their working conditions or not. The union claimed that those pressing the sad face were then being identified by their fingerprints and asked to explain their grievances to management.
Whatโs the easiest way to type ยฏ\_(ใ)_/ยฏ?
While some people say it isnโt strictly an emoji, Unicode does include the shrug gesture ยฏ\_(ใ)_/ยฏ in its classifications. Ironically, the easiest way to type it is to Google โHow to type shrug emojiโ then just copy and paste it from the results page and not type it at all.
The last word on emojis
From their creator, Kurita, interviewed in 2016:
โI donโt accept that the use of emoji is a sign that people are losing the ability to communicate with words, or that they have a limited vocabulary. Some people said the same about anime and manga, but those fears were never realised. And itโs not even a generational thing โฆ People of all ages understand that a single emoji can say more about their emotions than text. Emoji have grown because they meet a need among mobile phone users. I accept that itโs difficult to use emoji to express complicated or nuanced feelings, but they are great for getting the general message across.โ
