Emojis are widely used in texting. [Picture: Bestgorio]
Remember when emotions were expressed as :-), ;-), and :=(? I barely do, because they were quickly replaced by the more powerful 😂, 😉, and 😭 by the time I was able to operate my mother’s BlackBerry in 2012.
But more than a decade later, these versatile creatures have evolved to assume lives of their own. From their humble Japanese origins to their bewildering Gen Z definitions, emojis have come a long way to shape how we convey messages via text.
“Emojis originate from Japan in the 1990s, from early mobile devices and mobile internet,” says Keith Broni, editor-in-chief of Emojipedia. “In those early stages, there were small pixelated designs due to the restrictions of the technology,” he adds.
Before long, thanks to their huge popularity in the Far East, American companies Apple and Google knocked on the doors of the Unicode Consortium – a nonprofit organisation dedicated to emojis.
Their lobbying successfully got emojis adopted by the Unicode Standard in 2010. Proving to be wildly popular amongst Western audiences, the number of emojis has since increased from roughly 700 to 3 800 today.
“The feature was shown to be popular amongst Western audiences and was added as a core feature by most smartphone manufacturers between 2012 and 2015, during which time they exploded in popularity,” he says.
With more than six billion text messages whizzed across the planet everyday, it comes as no surprise that the more than four billion people who rely on the medium for communication would seek a more human-touch. Ironically, emojis are the best option.
With a multitude of people from all walks of life relying on emojis to convey their feelings – or sometimes downplay a serious situation with a quick ‘😭’ – there are so many ways one could use and interpret them.
“For example,” says Broni, “different cultures historically use different hand gestures to convey different meanings, and these can follow through into how members of those cultures perceive those hand gestures in emoji form.”
It’s not just a cultural thing, however. Being a member of the notorious Gen Z, I sometimes find my cheeks flushed when I stand accused of misinterpreting an emoji or, worse, misusing it.
Keeping up with new, bizarre, slang terms is hard enough (can someone please tell me what is ‘sigma’, again?), but what about those that get “emojified”, to steal Broni’s word.
Just as much as we can’t blame our parents for awkwardly misusing the skull emoji, as in “your uncle just died💀”, how can anyone blame me for keeping up with the programme to know that ‘🧢’ was supposed to mean “lies”???
On to the more serious stuff, though, emojis unsurprisingly caught themselves in political currents of late. With a drive for more “representativeness”, the taco emoji was born, with the aim to expand inclusivity on the keyboard. Even an Emoji Subcommittee was created.
While tacos may have made it, rifles did not. Says our emoji expert: “It was stopped late in the process due to fears of it being used to represent gun violence”.
Today, anyone across the globe can propose a new emoji, “but there is a very specific process that has to be followed”. Who knows, if someone is brave enough to do the work and submit all the paperwork, we might get a K-Pop emoji one day!
