Icons That Speak Louder Than Words: How Emojis Took Over Our Conversations

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Many people know how to read our faces and understand our emotions when we converse with them. Some don't get the point even if we talk to them. As technology has advanced, we are all communicating with each other through our mobiles even if we don't get to talk face to face. Sometimes words are not enough to tell the other person what you are feeling and so you send what is known as smileys or emojis through text messages. These are icons that supposedly express your emotions in the digital world.

But as you send them with a smile, or maybe even with a frown, have you once stopped to wonder, how these emojis came into being? Who created them and what was their origin? Did you also know that emoji comes from the Japanese word for picture pronounced as "eh" and letter or character pronounced as "moji"? Even if the answer is a yes or a no, let's dig deeper and know more emojis-

Emoticons, 1982 - Scott Fahlman was a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University. He was the first one to string these digital facial expressions together. In 1982, on the school's online bulletin board, he promoted the use of smiley and sad face emoticons in emails to add emotional context and prevent miscommunication. Soon it spread to online chat rooms and served as a predecessor to the emojis we have today.

Emojis, 1997 - SoftBank, known as J-Phone at that time released their SkyWalker DP-211 SW mobile phone which was complete with the world's first-ever built-in emoji set. The set offered 90 distinct emojis featuring an early version of the 'pile of poo' emoji which was later popularized by Apple. Unfortunately, these 12-bit digital expressions only came in one colour - black, which probably made users want more. Not just that they were connected to a high-priced phone that ended up being a flop in the market.

Emojis, 1999 - The first set of emojis is actually credited to Japanese phone carrier Docomo. These digital expressions were created by the designer Shigetaka Kurita in 1999 and there were 179 images, each comprising a 12 by 12 grid of pixels. The idea was to make communication on Docomo's mobile internet platform more easier and stylish. So Kurita focused on colourful, information-rich symbols like weather phenomena, hobbies, modes of transportation and numbers.

The Unicode Standard - Over the following decade, emojis gained popularity beyond Japan and began to attract interest from companies worldwide. However, widespread adoption across various platforms faced a significant challenge. Since computers operate using numbers, every character in every language needs to be "encoded," meaning it must be assigned a specific numerical value. Previously, hundreds of different encoding systems existed, causing frequent translation issues between computers and servers - and now emojis were encountering the same problem.

In 2007, Google approached the Unicode Consortium, a Silicon Valley nonprofit dedicated to standardizing text across modern software, to advocate for emoji recognition. Two years later, Apple engineers Yasuo Kida and Peter Edberg joined the effort, submitting a proposal for Unicode to include 625 new emojis into its library.

This proposal was approved in 2010, opening the door for companies like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Twitter to develop their own versions of emojis, knowing they would remain compatible across different operating systems. At that moment, emojis had truly entered the mainstream.

But the emoticon creator Scott Fahlman wasn't very pleased with the outcome. In an interview with 'The Independent' in the year 2012, he outright criticized the modern emojis as ugly, adding these exact words "ruin the challenge of trying to come up with a clever way to express emotions using standard keyboard characters".

The Upcoming Emojis - According to CNN news, we can expect emojis that are going to represent us on smartphones by next year. Some of them are an exhausted face with bags under its eyes, a root vegetable, a harp, a leafless tree, a fingerprint, shovel and more. The exhausted emoji face is the most anticipated emoji in the World Emoji Awards where it received more than 60% of votes. The leafless tree emoji is meant to raise awareness of drought and climate change. Different operating services such as Apple iOS and Alphabet's Android have also started adding their unique touch on the emoji designs.

That was about emojis, to conclude, what emoji expresses your emotion today?