Cultural Influence of Emoji Part II

There is a gender divide in the use of emoticons, with women generating a disproportionate amount of online emoji content.  In a study conducted by an online dating site,  a man with a smiley face on their profile received 6% fewer messages than those who didn't. Women who used the same icon received 60% more messages than women who didn't.

Although Emoji may seem like a new phenomenon, it was precluded by talks with Francis Bacon and John Wilkins in the 1950s, who envisioned a pictorial language that would act as a form of universal language between countries.

Our earliest form of writing was also in the form of hierogliphs and similar pictorial script around 5000BC, with alphabetic writing only taking form around 1200BC, which is interesting in the sense that written communication is in a sense going backwards, while technology moves forwards.

Cultural Influence and Importance

Since the widespread popularity of smartphones and web communication, the emoji has become more important in popular culture than ever before. 2015 has seen the use of emoji rise dramatically, with the emoji 'Face With Tears of Joy' being named 2015's Word of The Year by the Oxford Dictionary, as it has been the most used emoji across all platforms, and one of the most used characters overall.


A social network named emojli, was launched last year on which users could only communicate through emoji; , over 50,000 people had already reserved usernames (consisting of strings of emoji) two days after it's announcment. Some enthusiasts even believe emoji have literary potential. After raising $3,500 on Kickstarter, data engineer Fred Benenson set out to translate every line of Moby Dick into emoji. Using Amazon’s crowd-sourcing project Mechanical Turk, Benenson managed to find thousands of strangers willing to work on the project. Three people translated each line of Melville’s text;with second group selecting the best translation of the three. This book , named Emoji Dick, is 200 dollars for a hard copy.


Emoticons and emoji are changing the way we communicate faster than linguists can keep up with, and according to Ben Zimmer, it is the wild west of the emoji era, in which its evolution in linguistics is completely organic.


At the forefront of the research into emoji use today is Stanford-trained linguist Tyler Schnoebelen. By analyzing emoticon use on Twitter, Schnoebelen has found that use of emoticons varies by geography, age, gender, and social class—just like dialects or regional accents.


Different social circles also tend to use different emojis for communicating, with newcomers to a circle expanding or adapting their emoji vocabulary to fit in, similar to someone learning new slang or colloquialisms.

Difference Between Emoji and Emoticons

Invented multiple times over human history, its internet-era genesis is widely considered to have occurred in September 1982, when computer scientist Scott Fahlman suggested to the Carnegie Mellon University message board that :-) and :-( could be used to distinguish jokes from serious statements online. Shortly thereafter came the name, a portmanteau of the phrase “emotion icon”.


Emoticons and multiple similar methods of portraying emotion in text have been recorded throughout history, but emoticons as we know it were invented, according to most sources, in 1982 by Scott Fahlman, a computer scientist, who used emoticons such as a sad face or smiley face could be used to distinguish jokes from serious statements on his university's online message board. The actual etymology of the word emoticon is a merging of the words emotion and icon; Emoticon.


Emoji were created in the late 1990s by NTT DoCoMo, the Japanese communications firm. The name is a contraction of the words e and moji, which roughly translates to pictograph.


Unlike emoticons, emoji are actual pictures. Where as emoticons were invented to portray emotion in environments where nothing but basic text is available, emoji are actually extensions to the character set used by Unicode, the most widely used text system on modern OS's, and can be found widely used on social media sites such as Facebook, and on nearly all modern smartphones and similar devices.









http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/06/difference-between-emoji-and-emoticons-explained

http://whatjapanthinks.com/2007/09/19/turns-25-but-how-old-are-japanese-emoticons/





Asteroff, Janet (1987). Paralanguage in Electronic Mail: A Case Study. (Ph.D.). Columbia University.

What Are Emoji?

Emoji, commonly known as 'smileys', often confused with emoticons, are small digital images used in digital communication such as text messages, social media communication and posting, along with many other forms of communication in technology.  They are used to express an idea or an emotion visually, using a small amount of space that would otherwise require a much larger amount of text to express, or that could not be expressed properly, or at all with text alone.

Emoji chart

It originates from the Japanese portmanteau of 'e' for picture, and 'moji' for letter or character.  It is complete coincidence that emoji sounds similar to the word 'emotion' in the English language.

They were invented in the late 90s by Shigetaka Kurita, who was invloved in the launch of the world's first mobile internet platform during his time at NTT docomo, a large mobile service provider in Japan.

The reason for this was that the phone which was to use the new internet platform had a very small screen, with a limited amount of space for characters, which Kurita felt would make it difficult for users to express themselves with text alone.

Inspired by emoticons, which were invented in the early 80s, and by 'manpu' from Japanese manga, (common visual indicators of emotion) he invented the emoji.

Common visual indicators, eg. teardrops overhead represent nervousness.