Stolk describes how, long before the emoji?

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This week it was announced that a new set is in the works for next fall. Whether they'll all make it to our keyboards remains to be seen, but the drawing board definitely includes pushing hands, ginger root, and the jellyfish.

Every day, we send each other millions of emojis worldwide, our social media is overflowing with them, and the annual release of new emoji sets by the Unicode Consortium (more on that later) always creates quite a stir . Emojis have also been a popular subject of scientific research for years. Within communication science, of course, but also within other disciplines such as psychology, intercultural communication, and even law. For example, research is being conducted into how sent emojis can serve as potential evidence in forensic investigations . And to think that emojis have only been widely and universally embraced as a visual language since 2011(!), the year the first set of emojis appeared on the keyboards of our smartphones and other devices thanks to Unicode.

Wordless Book" (affiliate) is a comprehensive and easy-to-read

 Dutch standard work on the meaning of emoji culture. In her book, even saw the light of day, the yellow smiley face was born in the US. Graphic designer Harvey Ball ( although Hollywood gave it a different spin ) drew the cheerful face in 1963 for $45, commissioned by an insurance company that wanted to boost employee morale. He called it the "smiley."

The design was successively embraced by the hippie movement, 80s pop  accurate cleaned numbers list from frist database culture, and acid house, thus surviving for decades. In the 80s, Professor Fahlman had an email discussion with colleagues one evening about ARPAnet, the precursor to the internet. In their final message, they joked about a free fall from an elevator at the faculty. To ensure their colleagues didn't mistake this message for a serious announcement the next morning, Fahlman ended it with a :-). With that, the emoticon (a portmanteau of emotion and icon) was officially born as an internet language. Or rather, the smiley made of punctuation marks.

From emoticon to emoji

The design for the first set of emojis  character) was originally created by Japanese designer Shigetaka Kurita and was released in 1999. In Japan, the emojis have been popular for years before we even sent a single one here. Kurita's set is only usable on devices that support Japanese characters. And those are primarily Japanese devices.

The fact that it took until 2010 for Unicode, the consortium that digitizes our language by assigning codes to it, to code emoji for universal computer use is largely due to the Western world's focus on itself and economic interests. Only around 2010, when Japan had become a viable market, did major tech companies start to take an interest. Kurita's original emojis were still widely used there, but programs like Gmail couldn't display them.