From a humble smiley face with a box mouth and inverted “V”s for eyes, crude weather symbols, and a rudimentary heart — emoji have exploded into the world’s fastest-growing language.
There are about 1,800 emoji characters — and counting. They cover everything from emotions and food to professions, are racially diverse and have become an integral part of the smartphone age.
The digital hieroglyphics are regarded as so significant that New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), which is home to works by Andy Warhol and Pablo Picasso, is exhibiting the original 176 designs.
Photo: AFP
Shigetaka Kurita, the man who created the characters, is still surprised by the success of his idea, but says he was meeting an obvious need.
“It wasn’t only Japanese who felt inconvenienced when they were exchanging text messages. We were all feeling the same thing,” he says.
Kurita was working at major telecom NTT DoCoMo in 1999 when he sketched out one of the first emoji, a clunky-looking thing barely recognizable as the precursor to today’s yellow smiley face.
Kurita was also experimenting with how to make information, such as weather forecasts, more accessible on the small screens of emerging cellphones, deciding visual aids would help. The sun and umbrella symbols — both open and closed — were among his earliest creations.
For inspiration, Kurita says he tapped Japan’s popular manga comics and the country’s complicated writing system that uses two sets of phonetic letters mixed with Chinese characters, known as kanji.
Keenly aware of how text messages could be misconstrued, he wanted to create visual accompaniments to help articulate tone.
“With a heart, the message can’t be negative whatever the text says,” Kurita says, describing his motivation to include the sign.
This month Kurita is going to New York to visit the exhibition honoring his creation, whose name is a combination of the Japanese words for pictures and letters.
“These 12 x 12 pixel humble masterpieces of design planted the seeds for the explosive growth of a new visual language,” Paul Galloway, a design collection specialist at the museum, wrote on its Web site.
Among Kurita’s ideas for original emoji was a pile of feces.
“I made poo. It’s childish, but I thought it’s good to have something that makes people chuckle,” he said. “The company turned it down for the sake of its corporate image.”
Today, a smiley-faced poop is one of the world’s most popular emoji, though according to the emojitracker Web site, a face with tears of joy is the symbol that is used the most.
Despite being popular in Japan around the turn of the century, it took another decade for emoji to really take off globally.
Their success is in part due to the soaring popularity of smartphones, which has resulted in a jump in mobile messaging.
Around 2010, a consortium of tech firms adopted a standardized table so that emoji could be used across different platforms. Subsequently they became available on the iPhone and there was no turning back.
They are now found in every type of online communication, whether it is tennis star Roger Federer using them to announce his comeback from an injury or Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop sending an angry red face to describe Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Reality star Kim Kardashian, who has 88.9 million followers on Instagram alone, developed her own range of “Kimoji” symbols. There are also apps for users to create their own, personalized emoji and avatars.
It is estimated emojis are used by 92 percent of the “online population,” according to the 2015 Emoji Report, released by a digital marketing firm.
In the same period, the Oxford Dictionary chose an emoji as its word of the year.
This month, a London translation agency said it was advertising for its first “emoji translator” to help meet the “challenges posed by the world’s fastest-growing language.”
“We have turned a corner in writing, whereby phonetic script and visual symbols are being integrated more and more,” said University of Toronto anthropology professor Marcel Danesi, author of The Semiotics of Emoji: The Rise of Visual Language in the Age of the Internet.
“In some ways, [emoji] have rendered communication much more fluid and effective,” he said.
MINERAL DEPOSITS: The Pacific nation is looking for new foreign partners after its agreement with Canada’s Metals Co was terminated ‘mutually’ at the end of last year Pacific nation Kiribati says it is exploring a deep-sea mining partnership with China, dangling access to a vast patch of Pacific Ocean harboring coveted metals and minerals. Beijing has been ramping up efforts to court Pacific nations sitting on lucrative seafloor deposits of cobalt, nickel and copper — recently inking a cooperation deal with Cook Islands. Kiribati opened discussions with Chinese Ambassador Zhou Limin (周立民) after a longstanding agreement with leading deep-sea mining outfit The Metals Co fell through. “The talk provides an exciting opportunity to explore potential collaboration for the sustainable exploration of the deep-ocean resources in Kiribati,” the government said
The head of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, was sacked yesterday, days after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he no longer trusts him, and fallout from a report on the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack. “The Government unanimously approved Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposal to end ISA Director Ronen Bar’s term of office,” a statement said. He is to leave his post when his successor is appointed by April 10 at the latest, the statement said. Netanyahu on Sunday cited an “ongoing lack of trust” as the reason for moving to dismiss Bar, who joined the agency in 1993. Bar, meant to
Indonesia’s parliament yesterday amended a law to allow members of the military to hold more government roles, despite criticisms that it would expand the armed forces’ role in civilian affairs. The revision to the armed forces law, pushed mainly by Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto’s coalition, was aimed at expanding the military’s role beyond defense in a country long influenced by its armed forces. The amendment has sparked fears of a return to the era of former Indonesian president Suharto, who ex-general Prabowo once served and who used military figures to crack down on dissent. “Now it’s the time for us to ask the
The central Dutch city of Utrecht has installed a “fish doorbell” on a river lock that lets viewers of an online livestream alert authorities to fish being held up as they make their springtime migration to shallow spawning grounds. The idea is simple: An underwater camera at Utrecht’s Weerdsluis lock sends live footage to a Web site. When somebody watching the site sees a fish, they can click a button that sends a screenshot to organizers. When they see enough fish, they alert a water worker who opens the lock to let the fish swim through. Now in its fifth year, the
RSS