The curious case of emoji 👀
How did emoji become so popular? Why does every keyboard have emoji?
Almost all of us have used emoji in some form while typing. But the growth of emoji is not often spoken! Today, I’ll dive deep into how emoji came to be, where we’re at right now and where they are heading in the future.
The history of emoji
The first widely used emoji was created 20 years ago in Japan, in 1999. Soon, Docomo and other Japanese manufacturers picked up the trend of emoji. They started growing in popularity, as more emoji were created based on facial expressions, cultural references, and manga. Docomo and Softbank spearheaded the creation and proliferation of emoji through their devices. They became a part of the Unicode standard too, which is a global standard for encoding text in a format that computers can understand.
One pivotal point in the growth story of emoji was Unicode 6.0, which was released in 2010. With this standard, almost 600 new expressions were included in the standard, thus leading to rapid growth.
Not surprisingly, this was the exact time when smartphones were getting popular. Android and iOS were becoming the standard operating systems for phones across the world. These operating systems integrated emoji into their standard keyboards, making delightful messaging experiences.
In 2015, 😂 became Oxford Dictionaries’ word of the year! Around this time, it also became apparent that the existing set of emoji was not inclusive to races, genders, and cultures. So, Unicode took steps to make the choice of picking colour available to users. Today, Unicode is also taking steps towards making gender-neutral emoji, disabled-friendly emoji, and culturally diverse emoji.
One thing to note - Although the word emoji is very similar to the word emoticons, which was very common in the west, actually they are very different. An emoticon is a set of letters used to describe a facial expression. For example - :) signifies a slightly smiling face, while an emoji looks like an actual image.
The potential of emoji
The growth of emoji has been a perfect example of how a picture is worth several words. To say “rolling on the floor laughing,” you need a single 🤣. Not just that, emoji easily cross language barriers. It is very hard to communicate with someone who doesn’t know your language through words, but your facial expressions remain the same. Happiness means happiness across cultures and countries of the world.
Considering this, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation proposed a mosquito emoji to describe mosquito-borne illnesses like Malaria and Dengue. This is a great validation of the growth story of emoji and why they have such huge potential.
I am convinced that emoji culture is only going to grow and diversify. With so many diverse cultures around the world, emoji are going to become all the more popular.
How can we contribute?
Every year, Unicode considers adding new emoji to be added to the standard. Anyone, including you, can submit emoji to Unicode to be considered for inclusion. Looking at the current selection of emoji, there is room for creating culturally-unique emoji. India has its own unique expressions and suggestions. For example, chai, a truly Indian phenomenon connects almost the entire country. Can we create a unique ‘Chai’ emoji? Can we create businesses around new emoji?
On that note, I’ll end this post with a question -
Can you create a new emoji that represents a unique aspect of your culture?
Please reply and let me know.
Last week, I found that posts like this could provide value to startup founders.
Do you know any founders? If so, please ask them to connect with me. I want to learn how they think about starting a new company.
Thanks for reading :)
Hemant
Photo by Bernard Hermant on Unsplash