⟁
It's an Emoji Story 👩🏼💻
I was a dyslexic kid who grew up with a love for visual art, not necessarily because I was great at it or my family was particularly cultured, but simply because images were legible to me. The written word eluded me, "b" became "d", and sentences were always out of order. On library day in the third grade, I used to pray to the Virgin Mary to let me find and check out Where's Waldo, the only library book I knew had only pictures and no words to read in it. On the days when that particular book wasn't available, I would borrow large format children's books and copy the illustrations. Image based communication was something I longed for and found via visual art. Being neurodivergent and tending toward visual communication meant I was primed for the invention and early adoption of Emoji.
My personal experience with Emoji began through its country of origin, Japan. I have been collecting Japanese stationery for most of my adult life, and studied Japanese theater and dance, Noh and Butoh, respectively. I was introduced to Emoji the minute they hit the iphone by a fellow Japanese art and technology connoisseur. We had already been texting emoticons with the Japanese kana keyboard for iphone. We would send text message containing a variety of whimsical pictographs:
-
@(・●・)@
-
☆*:.｡. o(≧▽≦)o .｡.:*☆
-
ʕ•̫͡•ʕ•̫͡•ʔ•̫͡•ʔ•̫͡•ʕ•̫͡•ʔ•̫͡•ʕ•̫͡•ʕ•̫͡•ʔ•̫͡•ʔ•̫͡•ʕ•̫͡•ʔ•̫͡•ʔ
It was simply a natural progression for me to move from sending emoticon picture messages to sending Emoji texts. Unlike the Japanese kana keyboard, which contains a small assortment of pictographic images, the Emoji keyboard has hundreds of character options. Those little characters have become ubiquitous and ingrained in the way we communicate with each other.
As technology has advanced our methods of communication have evolved. Personal visits and aural communication gave rise to letters, letters gave rise to phone calls, phone calls gave rise to emails, email gave rise to text messages, and text messages gave rise to Emoji texts, and so on. Each new electronic technology, from Morse code to the mobile phone, has allowed us to connect over greater distances with lightning speed and also disrupted face-to-face communication. Not coincidentally, Emoji (💜, 😀, 😞, and even 🍆) have arrived just in time to take center stage in the shifting and abstracting scale of human dialogue.
Since my first Emoji text in 2011, my relationship to Emoji has expanded from early adopter to Emoji artist, Emoji researcher, Emoji translator and (dare I say?) one of the foremost Emoji Experts. Throughout my tenure exploring the international language of texts, I created the Emoji Foundation, an organization that promotes, explores, and translates the written word into the pictorial alphabet of Emoji. After that I designed and developed the Emoji Dictionary, the first crowdsourced Emoji resource on the web, which receives millions of visits each year. My latest creative venture was an iOS VR game, EmojiFlower VR. My work has been featured in various media outlets: podcasts, Radio London BBC, Wired, and CBS news to name a few. Because of this I've had a front row seat to watching Emoji evolve over the last decade.
How Emoji Started 🆕
The first emoji were created in 1999 by Japanese artist Shigetaka Kurita. Emoji was accepted into the Unicode standard in 2010. " This allowed Apple and Google to share the same set of Unicode characters on their OS platforms." The Unicode Standard is a character coding system designed to support the worldwide interchange, processing, and display of the written texts of the diverse languages and technical disciplines of the modern world. In addition, it supports classical and historical texts of many written languages." In 2011, Apple added an official emoji keyboard to iOS; Android followed suit two years later. This allowed people to access emoji directly from a keyboard on their phones and popularized emoji with a global audience.
Emoji and the Brain 🧠
My interest in Emoji stems from the fact that I believe it has become a prevalent and even necessary form of mediated visual communication. We rely on it to give us signals and visual cues that faces and live expressions once did. Leonard Shlain writes about language versus visual communication and the connection with dyslexia. He believes that TV has shifted our brains to move more toward the right/visual hemisphere of the brain. Traditionally, 90% of language centers live on the left side of the brain. He also points out that dyslexic people who are right handed have up to a 70/30 split with only 70% of language centers in the left side of the brain. Images have weightiness, and are structured differently than text.
. . . A previously unrecognized affliction called dyslexia (nonexistent in ideographic China) broke out at alarming rates in classrooms all across Eurocentric TV-land. Dyslexic children, predominantly male (9:1), have difficulty deciphering the alphabet. One credible theory proposes that it is due to a failure of hemispheric dominance. Ninety percent of the language centers traditionally reside in the left hemisphere of right-handed people. In the right-handed dyslexic, the distribution of language centers may be more on the order of 80/20 or 70/30. Although we cannot be sure that dyslexia was not always among us, it seems to have erupted at the very moment that an entire generation was devaluing the left hemispheric mode of knowing. Perhaps television is the agent equilibrating the human brain's two differing modes of perception.
Emoji are filling in the gaps for our lack of direct, present communication as the language of visual media is changing the way our minds work. They evoke right brain responses. They turn on different thinking centers. The derived meanings are more up to the recipient[.]{.ul} They are less definite, and therefore[,]{.ul} they are capable of greater semiotic inscription. As a right-handed dyslexic, this was really interesting to me and maybe explains why I have such an affinity for Emoji as an expressive mode.
How Emoji Are Changing (us?) 🤔
A pictograph is a graphic symbol that conveys its meaning through its pictorial resemblance to a physical object. The chart below shows the evolution of the Chinese language from oracle bone script to modern day Chinese characters. I've added on the new Emoji characters to this so we can see their link back to the original pictographic beginnings. Perhaps the reintroduction of pictographic characters into modern communication suggests a cross cultural, trans-liguistic new language emerging at the beginning of its linguistic cycle.
Will we see Emoji become abstracted and refined in the same way the Oracle Bone characters evolved into Seal Script? I would argue we have already witnessed Emoji's transformation with culture. Notice the visual difference between Apple Emoji designed in 2008 to the 2018 release pictured below. The images have gained fidelity and design detail in the first example of the Person Tipping Hand Emoji. Moreover, in 2019 non-binary Emoji were introduced to phones everywhere as a move toward trans inclusion.
Source: Twitter/Emojipedia
In 2016 Apple made the move to change the gun Emoji to a water gun after various activist groups complained about the depiction. Concern, it turns out, was justified because A 12-year-old child in the US was charged after allegedly threatening her school in an Instagram post that used a gun , knife and bomb emoji (🔫 🔪 💣). Also, a teen in Brooklyn, NY was arrested for posting a police emoji with pistol emojis pointing at his head according to CNN.
Source: Twitter/Emojipedia
Emoji creation and adoption by Unicode Foundation, the organization responsible for managing web fonts, is showing no signs of slowing. The latest release, 13.1 includes seven new characters and the option to create interracial couple Emoji. My hope is that the lexicon scales outward with millions of users around the world until Emoji has become the most important and widely used visual language of the 21st century.
Bio
Niki Selken is an interaction designer, artist and curator living in Oakland. She is one of the foremost expert on Emoji.