Emoji

From DigitalRhetoricCollaborative

An emoji is a pictorial character used to communicate objects, ideas and emotions. The word “emoji” derives from the Japanese word for picture (e) and the word for emotion (moji). Emojis are the offspring of emoticons which seek to express emotion in textual settings. The emoji first appeared in Japan in the late 1990s and have since spread across the world. The icons are separated amongst different categories and occasions specific to Japanese culture and each character “has an official named, defined as part of the Unicode standard”. Unicode is “a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world’s writing systems” ^[1].

Contents 1 History/Origins 2 Developments 3 Multimodality 4 Contextual Analysis 5 Rhetorical Effects 6 Word of the Year 7 References 8 External Links

History/Origins

Emojis are the descendants of the emoticon. The emoticon was born in 1982 out of the need to minimize digital miscommunications. Computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon found it difficult for their jokes to translate in online discussion boards, so research professor Scott Fahlman suggested sarcastic messages be labeled with :-). Soon, other faces emerged to show other emotions: :-(, ;-), XD, etc. [3]. In 1999 The Japanese wireless mobile company, NTT DoKoMo, was the first to discover the technology behind the emoji and how to relay the message in a single character. Shigetaka Kurita figured these symbols could be applied to the rising use of mobile messaging and email amongst teenagers. Docomo first introduced the heart symbol as a way for teenagers to incorporate sentiment into their texts. In its written form, the Japanese language loses much of the emotional resonance that exists through vocal cues. The emoji puts the emotion back in communication [4]. The emoji discovery made character limits more manageable. The initial set of characters included 172 emoji icons created to simplify multimedia messaging and contribute additional features to electronic communication.^[2]

In 2011, Apple’s iOS operating system released the Apple Color Emoji keyboard. Other companies, such as Android, also adopted the emoji phenomenon after the increasingly wide popularity. Microsoft further expanded the use of emoji with the addition of monochrome Unicode emoji coverage to the Segoe UI Symbol system font in Windows 8 with color later added in Windows 8.1. ^[3]

Developments

New Emojis are frequently released alongside new software. Users wishing to obtain these new icons simply must update their cell phones or computers to have them automatically downloaded to their devices. Notably the release of iOS 8.3 in April 2015 brought both racially diverse and LGBT Emojis to users for the first time. Emojis had previously only featured white characters and had very little LGBT options. [5]. Apple released iOS 9.1 in September 2015 which features a middle finger emoji along with 150 other new characters. [6]

Emojis rise in popularity has led to an abundance of applications that users can download to receive “extra” Emojis. Though these function and serve much like a regular Emoji, they are technically separate from the brand and thus must be downloaded separately. An example of this is the Star Wars app which users can download to access Emojis from this popular film. [7] Lifestyles Condoms introduced a sexting keyboard in November 2015 where users can access condoms, lingerie and other sexually charged icons. [8]

Multimodality

Multimodality is a communication practice through visual, spatial, linguistic, textual and aural forms to create a message. Emojis allow communicators to visually create a message through depictions of people, places and objects. Emojis are a modern text in that they have not been a longstanding, traditional form of communication. Writing is moving towards images, as seen with the emoji.

Contextual Analysis

Rhetorical Effects

Word of the Year

In 2015, 😂was named Word of the Year by the Oxford Dictionary. It was chosen because it "best reflected the ethos, mood, and preoccupations of 2015." It is the first pictograph to win. The rise in Emoji use increased largely from 2014 to 2015, deeming it an appropriate choice for the year's word.

References

1. ↑ Emoji. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved April 21, 2015, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji
2. ↑ http://www.iemoji.com/articles/where-did-emoji-come-from
3. ↑ http://www.iemoji.com/articles/where-did-emoji-come-from

External Links

• Emojipedia
• Emoji Wikipedia
• Apple's Emoji Characters Will Soon Look More Like the World
• UTR #51: Unicode Emoji
• {http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/11/emojis-rapid-evolution.html Smile, You're Speaking Emoji] by Adam Sternbergh
• [9]
• [10]

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