The word emoticon is a mashup of the two words “emotional” and “icon.” Emoticons are “glyphs used in computer-mediated communication” to represent an idea. This could be people and faces or animals and cars. Eventually emoticons became emojis. Emojis are very similar to emoticons, but are more official and widely used today. Emojis are Japanese creations and are formed by the words, “e,” meaning picture, and “moji,” meaning character. Now emojis are the new normal that people constantly use. Emojis even replace words in most cases, but can also provide emphasis to a conversation.
The first emoticon was created in 1982 by Scott E. Fahlman, a Carnegie Mellon professor. He created this in order to give emotion to his messages. The first ever emoticon was the smiley face. It contained a colon, a dash, and a closing parenthesis. He also reversed the emoticon to create a frowny face. This consisted of the same symbols, except instead of closing parenthesis it used an opening parenthesis. This started out on the Carnegie Mellon campus but eventually branched out to other places through discussion boards and emails. Fahlman originally used these emoticons in emails.
Eventually Fahlman’s idea of expressing with symbols reached out across the world. In 1999, the first emoji was then created. Emojis were invented in Japan by Shigetaka Kurita. He created 176 emojis using a grid made up of 144 pixels, twelve by twelve. Emojis made it much easier because with emoticons, you had to use punctuation and symbols similar. This could become confusing if you wrote out an email and then used random punctuation. So, there was more ease in communication due to the creation of emojis when there was just one symbol. It was not until 2010, that Unicode started including emojis. Unicode is used in the coding of text. Apple and Android released 722 new emojis through Unicode in 2010. The next year, in 2011, IOS 5 was released. This incorporated an emoji keyboard as a new feature which would become the keyboard that holds 3,961 emojis today.
As the invention of the emojis advanced, more and more were created. In 2012, however, Fahlman spoke out in an interview. He said that “they ruin the challenge of trying to come up with a clever way to express emotions using standard keyboard characters.” When the creation of the emoji first arrived, there were many people creating new emoticons. Fahlman mentioned that he loved seeing all these creative contributions. There were emoticons that represented people like Abraham Lincoln and Santa Claus. The word “emoji'' was not added to the dictionary until 2013. There are no plans for the emojis to be added to the dictionary though. That would be quite ludicrous and time consuming.
As the years progress through this era, emojis start to become more prevalent in society. They are used for us to show emotion so commonly in texting and emails. They became so commonplace, that they inevitably were used in commercials and media. Here, their use was to show off people’s actual emotion rather than give context through text. McDonalds ran an ad in 2015 displaying people as emojis. In 2017, the release of the Emoji Movie smashed the box office numbers and gained much popularity. Its Rotten Tomatoes score was a 7% and yet still showed that emojis are so used that a successful movie could be made about them.
So the invention of the emoji changed the world and subsequently the way we communicate. In some ways, the new communication strategy is helpful. It gives more explanation behind sarcasm and conversations, but in other ways proves that we are using less words to explain our lives. We constantly find shortcuts to make typing to each other easier. The original emoji and its companions were added to the Museum of Modern Art to further show that it made a significant impact on the world.
No comments:
Post a Comment