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The Evolution Of Emojis

It was the weekend. I was driving to a brewery on the Northside to see a friend's 90s chick-rock cover band play when my phone buzzed.

            "Starting in 5…saved you a seat!"

"OK, great," I thought, "Seats at that place are usually hard to come by." Instead of texting that out, however, I hit the smiley key on the bottom left side of my iPhone's QWERTY keypad, chose the  from my recent emojis tab, and hit send. It struck me as slightly odd.

Why did I do this?

Why do we, collectively, as a generation, do this?

What draws us to that little dancing lady in a red salsa dress, or the pink sparkle heart? Cuteness? Convenience? Arguably not convenience in this specific case, as searching out the emoji required more steps than it would have taken to simply text out, "OK."

So what's the real reason millennials, and certainly other age groups, are so attracted to the thought of condensing whole ideas and emotions into two-dimensional, yellow glyphs. Fair question, no? Emojis, like the primitive emoticons that came before them, are a new language frontier; a new universal language, instantly communicating complex sentiments and feelings via tiny groupings of cleverly arranged pixels. I've broken down what I think makes Emojis such a burgeoning area of global communication; the veritable how, where, and what, if you will. Let's start with how.

1.) How Emojis Got Their Start

            Emoticons, the precursor to emojis, started off as nothing more than a colon, a dash, and a right-side parenthesis coming together to dance jauntily across someone's pager screen and communicate happiness. In the 80s and 90s, Emoticons used to look like this:

 

Look at the picture quality, eh?

There had to have been an original go-getter who strived for more than just plain words. After all, when we are having a good conversation with someone we don’t nod and say, "This is humorous. I am smiling now." We laugh and smile with our faces, giving a silent, though instantaneous visual representation of enjoyment or assent.

So who was this intrepid young conversationalist who kick-started the language "Emoji?" His name was Scott Fahlman, and during September of 1982, he was the first documented person to ever use the smiley as a means to convey a particular emotion.

Here's a transcript of his original proposal:

 

Fahlman was kind of a wise-guy and a bit of a cut-up, it seems.

This text was originally posted to the Carnegie Mellon University computer science message board and was consequently blowing minds in the field of computer science. Well, maybe not, but there is one important thing to notice about Fahlman's message.

2) Where Emojis Started  

            Scott Fahlmen, being the linguistic innovator that he was, was sure to explain to his fellow students at Carnegie Mellon that the emoticon should be read left to right, like most western languages, making those little "lying on their side" smilies fairly relatable to most on this side of the world.

            But let's break down the word Emoji for a minute. The word Emoji is a mash-up of the "emoticon" and the Japanese word "kaomoji".  A kaomoji is a style of transcribing emoticons that originated in Japan around 1986.

 

Presented in Technicolor for your view pleasure!

Japan essentially took those basic Fahlman-era emoticons, added some flair and some Japanese characters, and flipped them right side up. Doing so made emoticons more universal to both the eastern and western hemispheres. In a lot of countries, the primary language isn't read left to right, the way that primitive emoticons needed to be read. The Japanese style revolutionized emoticons by making them instantly more recognizable and accessible to people in countries with a root language other than a Germanic one. These "emojis" were very popular in Japan because of their use in early texting.

While they didn't take off with quite such a fervor in the United States, the idea of taking tiny sideways faces and flipping them upright to make them more emotive, was a novel one.

3) What Emoji Icons Are

Emojis are, at their heart, just faces. Yes, there are cat faces, noodles, random objects, and even unicorns, but essentially, they're just a means for us as a consuming public, to express ourselves; communicate.

In 2011, Apple announced the release of the Emoji keyboard. This was huge, because it brought a standardized Emoji language to the approximately 40 million iPhone users, just in the United States alone. Here's what our current Emoji keyboard front page looks like:

That guy in the sunglasses, he knows what's up.

Super familiar, right? But, even if you had just emerged from a WWII era bunker and were completely unaware of what emojis or emoticons were, you'd still be able to look at that guy with hearts for eyes and know that he's in love.

What makes it so that so many people from different walks of life look at these little yellow blobs and derive the same meaning? Let's break it down, science-style.

Located in the left hemisphere of the human brain is an area called the Broca's area, which is the part of the brain responsible for decoding languages. Human beings have always had the innate ability to create and understand language.

A little more obscure part of the brain, the Brodmann area, otherwise known as area 37, is the part of the brain that houses the Fusiform face area. In other words, it's the bits of your grey matter that are responsible for recognizing human faces. Just like the Broca's area, the existence of the Fusiform tells us that all human beings are biologically programmed to read faces as a language. Because of this ability, inherent in all humans, across all cultures, we are able to produce a simple, pictograph-based language like Emojis that is universally understood. Look at the complex sentences you can form with basic emojis that would enable two people who speak entirely different languages to communicate with one another.

 

I don't know about that last one, those thumbs are pointing in every which way...

There are those who believe that emojis are a fleeting trend, like slap bracelets or proper punctuation, but there is enough evidence to suggest that emojis are a new universal mode of communication that is here to stay. The world probably isn’t ready to call emojis a new language, but, based on the miracles that I produce with my Bitmoji (a whole new frontier of emojis) on iMessage, I'm ready to call myself bilingual. ; - )

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