How emoji took over the world
IF YOU are sensitive to flashing images, don’t visit emojitracker.com . The site, run by self-styled “artist and hacker” Matthew Rothenberg, is a grid, divided into 845 emoji, which light up every time they appear in a message on Twitter.
Day and night, seven days a week, the grid doesn’t stop blinking. It looks like the spectrum analyser on a stereo playing some form of frantic free jazz, on fastforward.
Around 20 of the emoji “cells” – Embarrassed Face, Praying Hands, the SeeNo-Evil Monkey – flash more or less constantly; others, every two or three seconds.
Click through to the most popular one of all – Face With Tears of Joy (which was used a staggering 6.6 billion times in 2015 on Twitter alone) – and it is impossible to read the “live feed” of messages containing the icon, so quickly is it updating.
Go to a slightly less popular one – the flexed bicep – and you are met by a bewildering stream of messages in dozens of different languages, all of them, one assumes, expressing admiration for big muscles or a tough mental attitude. A third – the Red Heart – overflows with proclamations of love.
This is the way people – especially people under 30 – communicate now.
Teenagers use emoji to ask each other out, moan about homework, send their friends a virtual hug, or inform the world they are in a bad mood.
Their older siblings attach them to funny photos, in place of wry remarks, or use them to invite friends to events (the glass of wine icon, plus the smiley face, for a dinner party, for example).
Wherever there is a trend, there is a marketeer, of course, trying to jump on the bandwagon, and companies from Burger King to the beauty brand, Dove, now litter their social media posts with emoji in an effort to inject humour and resonate with their customers.
Charities use them to raise money (participants in a World Wide Fund for Nature campaign two years ago volunteered to donate 10p (R1.75) every time they tweeted one of 17 pictures of an endangered animal) and, inevitably, politicians have started using them to appear more relatable.
Domino’s Pizza even established a system that allowed its customers to order food through emoji – consumers just needed to tweet the pizza slice icon to the chain’s Twitter handle (@dominos) and the restaurant would make their order (as long as you had previously set up your preferences on Domino’s website).
So, it should come as no surprise that there is now the The Emoji Movie, a 90minute animation that chronicles the adventures of a “Meh” icon who is horrified at the prospect of having to express indifference for his entire life, and his friend Hi-5, a walking, talking hand (voiced by James Corden) who has found himself underemployed ever since the arrival of his nemesis, the fist bump.
To say the film has had a lukewarm reception in the US, where it was released last week, is putting it mildly.
Everyone, from the cast (which, inexplicably, includes Patrick Stewart, the Shakespearean actor, as the voice of the “Poop” emoji) to the studio (Sony Pictures), has been castigated for their involvement in what has been seen as a cynical marketing exercise masquerading “If you don’t use emoji, it is like going into a shop and not smiling at the person who serves you,” Evans said.
But doesn’t it mean that teens, especially, are losing the ability to communicate with words? Many, after all, use emoji in a way that is completely indecipherable to parents.
Evans does not think there is any cause for concern. “People get hot and bothered about good language use, but emoji is not a language,” he says.
“Its job isn’t to replace language; it’s enhancing our communications. How do you convey irony in text speak, for example, without the eye-roll?
“There is a massive gap to plug in digital communication because we don’t have any of the non-verbal stuff that is crucial to signal personality, build empathy and manage the flow of communication.”
This “massive gap” was first identified in Japan in the late ’90s. It was the country that pioneered internet on a phone, and its tech companies realised early on that there was a huge demand for graphical representations of certain words and feelings, especially in a culture that traditionally required long, elaborate honorifics and salutations in written correspondence.
“People were using the internet on a 1.5in x 1.5in screen at this time, so messages had to be more concise,” says Paul Galloway, a collection specialist at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which acquired the very first set of emoji last year from the Japanese mobile phone operator NTT DoCoMo.
“But what was interesting was that, although the first set only included five faces, these were the things that were most popular by far; faces and the heart.
“So, within months, DoCoMo was releasing updates with more faces and other emotional icons, and that rapidly became the most dominant thing.”
Other rival operators started bringing out their own versions (many of them based on Japanese Manga characters and kanji symbols) and, as the technology improved, the characters, which were originally designed by Shigetaka Kurita at DoCoMo as 12-pixels by 12-pixels, became more sophisticated.
But, although Google introduced emoji to Gmail in 2008 and Apple added an emoji keyboard to its iPhone in Japan in 2008, it took until 2010 for the different tech companies in the West to agree upon their own set of emoji. When these finally appeared on the iPhone in 2011, the starting gun was fired and the current craze began.
Are they here to stay? Like every nascent form of communication, emoji are evolving and adapting to public demand. There are now icons that represent the love between two men and that between two women, as well as characters with different skin tones.
And later this year a new batch will contain, among other things, “gender-neutral” men, women and children, a woman in a headscarf, a breastfeeding emoji and dumplings (the latter after a social media campaign that highlighted the demand for the icon within Asian communities).
There are also hundreds of campaigns for other icons, from the kangaroo to people with red hair.
“Emoji is definitely here to stay,” says Vyvyan Evans. “They will improve as technology improves, but there is no going back. We need them to be effective communicators in the 21st century.” — The Daily Telegraph