Emoji (pronounced ih-moh-jee)
In digital
technology, a small digital picture or pictorial symbol that represents a
thing, feeling, concept etc, used in text messages and other electronic
communications, now usually as part of a standardized set. Technically an emoji is a digital graphic
icon with a unique code point.
1999:
From a creation in Japanese translating literally as “pictograph”, the
construct being e- (picture, drawing)
+ moji (written character or letter). In the original Japanese it’s 絵文字 (えもじ,
emoji), the construct being 絵 (え (e, (picture)) + 文字 (もじ (moji)
(character).
The
idea of localised conventions would later appeal to a community using a common
means of communication with a closed character set: Morse Code operators who
devised their own convenient shorthand, a set of numbers transmitted by a short
series of dots and dashes, which all understood represented longer strings of
text, commonly used messages including:
1- Wait
a moment
4- Where shall I go ahead?
6- I am ready
7- Are
you ready?
8-
Close your key; circuit is busy
12- Do you understand?
13- I
understand
24- Repeat this back
27- Priority, very important
29- Private, deliver in sealed envelope.
73- Best regards
88-
Love and kisses
92- Deliver promptly
The concept is exactly the same as the part of the algorithm used by data compression programs (ZIP and others) whereby small values are used to represent (and replace) larger ones, hence the ability to compress file-size. The pragmatic Morse operator's list was mostly business-like, focused on transmitting the most information with the fewest taps but there were a couple more romantic: 73 meant “best regards” and 88 “love and kisses”, both of which would become stalwarts in the world of emoticons and emojis.
Lindsay Lohan Emojis.
The
idea of the emoticon, still a disparate thing without standards, began to coalesce
in the 1990s, Microsoft bundling the wingdings
truetype font with Windows and by the middle of the decade, the first SMS (short
message services) products, the protocols for which had evolved as part of the GSM (Global
System for Mobile Communications) standards, were released. Strange as it may sound in an age when SMS
messages number annually in the trillions, the take-up rate was initially slow
but growth was soon exponential. Screen-focused,
emoticons were always integral to SMS.
While not the first emoji set, that being a
plain black collection included with the Japanese J-Phone in 1997, it’s Shigetaka
Kurita’s (b 1972) release in 1999 which is the first notable landmark. Interestingly, reflecting the intention to
make communication more efficient on NTT DoCoMo's business-oriented cellular
platform, apart from some hearts (intact and broken), the 176 in the set didn’t
include many to convey emotion, although in the abstract, the one representing
a beer glass was often used to suggest “I need a drink”. The beginnings were modest, reflecting both
the hardware and the mobile networks of the time; although bright, each was rendered
in a single color and the bitmapped shape was blocky but the range and
definition constantly improved to the point where, unlike emoticons, emojis really
are pictures rather than typographic approximations and this has influenced the
use of the word, "emoji" now sometimes applied to just about any
small picture in any digital context.
In the English-speaking world, critical mass in terms of
adoption was reached in 2012, the year after Apple added an official set to the
iOS keyboard, Android following in 2014 when KitKat was released. Apple had included emojis in the Japanese releases
of iOS since 2008 and may have been tempted to extend availability when it
became apparent how many hacks existed to gain the feature on devises using
other languages. What made that viable was emoji, in 2010, being standardized
by Unicode (the non-profit consortium which maintains text standards on digital
devices globally) which meant emojis could be sent and received by any device, regardless
of operating system or platform. By
then, the standard set had grown to almost a thousand. The Unicode Consortium has been busy ever
since, creating an emoji subcommittee which has so much business to transact it
meets at least weekly and their output has been prodigious: by September 2021,
over 3,600 emojis had been approved, 112 in the last release alone.
Crooked Hillary Clinton emoji.
A
character set in the thousands and growing has however changed the nature of the
emoji as a language supplement, it once being possible to know them all and
rely on many others also knowing most. With
so many, it’s become just another language, a system where every user has their
own sub-set and analysis of traffic suggests for most this can be just a
handful and even among devotees it’s rare for them regularly to display a vocabulary
of more than a few dozen. While, as a medium
of meaning, the emoji does depend on an intuitive understanding of appearance,
if some are too weird or mysterious, there is Emojipedia, an on-line emoji reference which documents changes and
definitions and EmojiTranslate is a website where the translation of text to emoji (and
vice versa) is handled. Even that isn’t
enough to satisfy the evidentiary standards of courts in some jurisdictions,
accredited translators now sometimes used to translate the meaning of emojis
where material using them is tendered in evidence. Emoji is just another language and something
in one cultural context can mean something else in another, the meaning the
sender implied perhaps the opposite of what the receiver inferred. On the basis of established principles such
as “reasonable doubt” or “balance of probabilities”, courts must decide.
Out in the world of the emoji freaks, books have been
written using nothing but emojis, a concept not new. In the 1990s, one pop-music journalist,
displeased at the quality of an interview with a singer he was about to publish,
rendered the whole thing in the zaph
dingbat font (which in professional typesetting had existed since the
1970s), rendering it an illegible cryptogram to all except those who had
memorized the mapping of the font. Such
people do exist but they’re rare and it’s not clear if the writer succeeded in
his aim to make more interesting a boring interview. One magazine to find a novel use was the fine
New Yorker which, in 2015, ran a
cover featuring Crooked Hillary Clinton emojis when discussing the mail server
affair, one of the many scandals attached to her although, they unfortunately
resisted the temptation to integrate a delete key into one. Perhaps inspired, in her presidential campaign, crooked Hillary tried to weaponize the emoji in a tweet aimed at a younger
demographic but received quite a backlash for doing something so obviously
cynical; inauthentic being the modern term.
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