Instead of a thousand words: how did emoji appear and why are they so popular

Фото: Depositphotos

Emoji - cute characters, which in the modern world to one degree or another enjoy almost everything.

In what lies the popularity of these fun characters, and how they appeared, the publication found out Medium.

Emoji vs emoticons (emoticons)

The combination of characters ???? means smiling face. This is an emoticon, a pictogram depicting an emotion created from different typographic signs. Users are limited only by their imagination and existing character set.

The emoji are concrete ideograms based on the standard. Unicode. To transfer an emoticon with a smiling face, you will need a special emoji.

Why do people use emoticons and emoji

The creator of the first emoticons, Scott Falman, believes that one of the main advantages of these graphic symbols is that they save space, in particular, it is important in those communication programs that have a limited number of characters. And still emoticons and emoji add a new shade to the words. Because of this, people began to use these characters as a style element of communication, and some of the icons became advanced 21 hieroglyphs of the century.

The very first Emoji set came up in 1999, Sighetak Kurita. He designed it for the Japanese telephone operator NTT DoCoMo. The set includes 176 Emoji, denoting people, places and objects.

When we communicate in the digital space, our emotions are limited on many levels: first, on the level of the technologies used (limiting characters in SMS and Twitter), secondly, in terms of the volume of communications (textual communication is inherently shorter) and, thirdly, due to the lack of non-verbal elements of communication (body language and intonation). The idea of ​​creating a language that goes beyond words is not new in itself.

Humanity communicates with the help of symbols for a whole millennium - from cave paintings to codified systems. It is curious that initially people used ideograms and pictograms, which then became letters and symbols, and with the advent of emoji, humanity began to return to the original idea of ​​using images instead of text.

Thanks to modern technology, it has become easier for people to communicate with each other, but at the same time it is more difficult to understand each other. Emoji helps to strengthen the connection between the interlocutors and solve the problem of a limited number of characters, time, style and even the language itself.

Censorship in Emoji

In 2015, on Instagram, it became possible to use hashtags with emoji and look for relevant publications on them. One of the symbols (eggplant) was soon removed from the social network, because some used it as a euphemism for the male sexual organ. Such an approach Instagram It looks rather strange, considering that you can safely use emoji, which designate a pistol, knife, pills, skull, bomb and cigarette, on the social network.

Emoji culture began to gain popularity in 2011, when Apple Lossless Audio CODEC (ALAC), added an emoji keyboard in iOS 5. Initially, it was intended only for the Japanese market, but when users of other countries began to make attempts to add such a keyboard to themselves, Apple decided to make it accessible to everyone.

How to add emoji to Unicode

Now Unicode is mainly engaged in collecting information about world languages ​​and writing systems, trying to understand how they can be displayed in digital form. Emoji is only a small part of this business.

Adding any ideogram — from a soccer ball to a Halloween pumpkin — requires a small presentation.

“People offer us which emoji to add, and then their proposals are considered by a special committee,” said co-founder and Unicode president Mark David.

Every week, the committee communicates by telephone and discusses not so much whether the world really needs this or that new emoji, how much the new ideogram meets the standards.

There are several reasons why emoji can be rejected. For example, the committee will not approve Emoji in the form of a Coca-Cola bottle or a pint of Guinness, but the image of a standard soda or beer may well be selected.

This committee reviews the proposed applications even before they fall into the hands of the members of the technical committee, which meets quarterly. The technical committee is thinking about whether the new Emoji will be actively used by the masses and whether it really needs to be added. After that, a list of candidates for the role of the new Emoji is made. In November of each year, a final list of new emoji candidates is established, which are added to Unicode in June of each year.

Unicode now supports more than 128 thousands of characters in all modern and some ancient languages.

Emoji Boom

Over the past few years, there has been a real boom in the use of Emoji in society, both in correspondence and in the real world. Due to the fact that people began to understand and actively use them, ideograms have become part of mainstream culture. If you do not really understand Emoji and do not understand the meaning of any of them, look in the online dictionary. Emojipedia. Still have a website Emojitracker.comwhere you can find actual data on the types of emoji that are used on Twitter.

With the help of Emoji, books and movies are being retold. So, in 2013, the classic Moby Dick was added to the US Library of Congress in an emoji retelling. In 2015, the speech of US President Barack Obama was translated into Emoji.

Despite all these rather successful attempts to “translate” into Emoji, translators and readers lack a single vocabulary of ideograms — many characters are used in different meanings, which causes misunderstandings that rarely occur in text.

Emoji in real life

Artists and publishers are actively using emoji as a means of self-expression. For example, in 2014, in New York, Emoji Art Fairwhere examples of the use of ideograms in pop culture, print, interactive entertainment, and applied arts were shown. Among them was a stand dedicated to emoji therapy for people with an autistic spectrum disorder. Emoji appeared at the show Art Baseland their original concepts are kept in the New York collection. Museum of Modern Art.

More and more, you can meet emoji in the real world. For example, in the Dutch city of Wathorst they can be seen on the facade of one of the buildings.

It is also worth paying attention to such an aspect as standardization. Emoji is based on Unicode, and therefore in different systems are displayed differently. For example, a cute golden heart on the Android OS may look like an ugly woolen heart. Companies like Apple Google и Facebook They are trying to solve this problem, because they are full members of the Unicode Consortium.

In 2017, more than 10 characters were added to the Unicode 8500 system, 56 of which were emoji.

Translation prepared edition RusBase.

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