picture courtesy: www.unsplash.com

Love them or hate them, you must have used them at some point of time, or be super addicted to them just like me. After all as the old adage goes, ‘a picture paints a thousand words’. Back when emojis were introduced no one would have fathomed the fame the emoji world tastes today, let alone expect them to become a sensation that they are.

Emojis are more than just a millennial fad; you could imagine it as a new language taking its baby steps.

In the past few years, emojis have become a hallmark for communication. Not only have they been nominated as the word of the year, but have also appeared in economic reports published by the White House. They even have a movie of their own! So emojis are for everyone and they’re everywhere.

Down the Memory Lane

The first emojis (Picture Courtesy: www.cnn.com)

The emojis are an evolved version of the emoticons (which are made from the typographical symbols), to add a little spark to conversations. They have been with us since the invention of the early computers. The first emojis were developed in 1999.

They were designed by the Japanese artist Shigetaka Kurita. He was part of the development team for ‘i-mode’, an early mobile internet platform from Japan’s main mobile carrier DOCOMO.

He wanted to simplify the way information was conveyed. So he designed a set of 12 by 12 pixel images which could be selected from the i-mode interface, and then sent on mobiles and pages as their own individual characters. Kurita had initially created 176 emojis. They are now part of the permanent collection displayed at the Museum of Modern Arts, New York.

The concept of emoji soon became a hit, as rival companies copied the idea. With the worldwide digital revolution, the concept soon grew out of Japan and companies like Apple began to incorporate emojis on other platforms. The year 2007 saw a software internationalisation team at Google trying to get the emoji recognized by the Unicode Consortium, a non profit organisation that tries to maintain text standards across computers.

Diversifying emojis

As emojis became more and more popular, people began to question the lack of diversity they had. There were several emojis for cuisines but it was as if they favoured certain regions over the others.

Many raised their opinion on how the emojis failed to serve a global palette. Soon people began to point out the streaks of patriarchy, racism and lack of diversity that ran in the emoji community.

For example, there were dozens of emojis depicting professions like doctors, chefs and policemen but were all mainly men. There were plenty of emojis depicting families but there were none to represent single parents and same sex families. While there was handful of emojis representing human gestures, why were they all white people?

By 2014, these questions were gaining more and more momentum and began to spread across the entire globe. There was a demand for an emoji line up that catered to the emotions of people from across the world.

It wasn’t just about having the right emoji to represent your lunch or your profession; no, it was a cry for a universal representation.

It was a demand to break down barriers and to have one’s culture and identity recognized and represented and that no one can be shunned away in the digital world. In 2015, the Unicode took a course changing decision to diversify the world of emojis by allowing users to pick a skin colour for their emojis. After this, there have been more and more efforts in making the emoji world a diverse one.

So, what’s next in the Emoji World?

Year after year more and more emojis are finding their way into the emoji lexicon. This means with each update the emoji world is growing one emoji at a time. Recently there have been plenty of new additions and have even included mythical creatures like genies, mermaids etc. New animal ones like hedgehog, new emotions that can tweak up your conversations like the puppy dog face, the hot and cold face etc. Emojis to depict the feelings of LGBT and single mothers have also come to be.

After all, emojis aren’t just a fun way to decorate your messages. They represent you as a person, and are an embodiment your emotions, culture and every aspect about you, all packed into one tiny image. They form a complex and ever growing language which will continue to evolve and flourish for years to come.