Do you even remember life before emojis?

Well, of course, emojis are not limited to smartphones; they’re everywhere, much like the s in the Milky Way.

My first mobile phone was a Motorola T2288. And I spent around 5,000 pesos (Dh343) to finally own one. Man, I was so .

It was 1999, I was a junior at university and that was the result of saving from my allowance. At the time, the phone to own was the Nokia 5110 (I’m amused that while we called Nokia phones by two twin-digit numbers [‘fifty-one ten’], in this part of the world, it’s spelled out numerically [‘fiveone-one-zero’]), so I had a decision to make; I spent days which phone I should get — the Nokia 3210 had just launched. So, with a couple of pals, I headed off to a famous area in Metro Manila called Greenhills, at the time,

the place for electronics.

It took me a lot of time to decide. One friend, already , finally blurted out: Dude, if you ain’t goin’ higher than a 5110, go for the Motorola.

Well, I did buy it, and like I said, I was so happy, ecstatic and . I finally had my own cellphone.

However, the T2288 had a little hitch: it

didn’t have text message ID, meaning texts would appear with the sender’s number, not the name of the contact, so I was forced — and somehow, able to —memorise all my contacts’ numbers, much to my . As text messages boomed, we got used to sending messages in a contracted way — ‘hw r u’ instead of ‘how are you’ — much to the thrill of lazy texters (also, a way to keep texts within the 160-character limit) and to the of academics watching proper grammar and diction evaporate.

And who wouldn’t forget combining characters to make it even more fun?

Scott Fahlman, a member of Carnegie Mellon University’s faculty, kicked off an unexpected rage on September 19, 1982 when he added ‘:-)’ and ‘:-(‘ to the message board to distinguish which posts are serious and the ones that are just -ing around.

Man, did it catch up. Everyone started coming up with his or her own clever combos. I remember, with that T2288, I used ‘c”,)’ as my insignia, ending my texts with that and making sure those who had my number on their phones had it next to my contact name. My best friend had ‘(“,)’. Others had similar combinations of punctuations to denote happy faces.

Here’s the funny thing: even before I got my first phone, I had no idea that some dude from named Shigetaka Kurita had already invented the emoji in 1998. The word ‘emoji’ is actually a union of two Japanese words: ‘e’ meaning ‘picture’ and ‘moji’ meaning ‘character’. What a idea!

July 17 is World Emoji Day. As at February, there are 2,283 emojis. It was reported, around mid-last year, that there were over five billion emojis sent every day. And that’s only

on Facebook Messenger. !

It’s that you could now select one face to express yourself instead of all those characters you need to bunch together, huh?

Now, have you asked yourself: how do you exactly use emojis to communicate? Allow me to list some of my reflections on these cute little critters that were so good it even got its own movie (but, no, I still haven’t seen The Emoji Movie).

But I am also concerned about the use of emojis. Let’s face it: there are times that you send a message just to make it look like you’ve responded to a text, or to make it appear that you’re not pissed off by sending out a . At times, I’d send something along the lines of no problem at all; I hope everything will be fine with you — but using a certain finger to do so.

I also don’t like the fact that some people send out multiple emojis of the same kind. C’mon, one is enough to let someone know how ecstatic you are; you don’t need .

!

Then again, emojis have created a whole new way to communicate. I really love combining them to make something more hilarious. I share a running gag with my son: on how we would (hypothetically, of course! ) cook our uber-noisy pet parrot Pierre back home in the .

Stuff like + + + + = make for some sure-fire entertaining nonsense. Oh, speaking of hamburgers, remember that issue between which hamburger is actually ‘correct’, the Android version or the iOS one? Tech does really continue to .

Emojis are also a way of uniting us. As time flew by, several of them were created to promote inclusion. I salute that. In a increasingly divided, all methods must be exhausted to bring up the message that, no matter where we’re from, we’re all equal.

That learning curve is also a gentle reminder that emojis, must be used responsibly; you wouldn’t want someone to be at you for misconstruing a for, well, never mind.

Can you imagine a world without emojis? I don’t think so. It’s also a learning process: back then, when I was first sent an ‘LOL’ message, I was oblivious to what it meant and I fired back with some because it was so close to a Tagalog swear word. Imagine the I felt when I found out what it actually meant.

And after all of this yakkity-yak-yak, I can truly say one thing: I ain’t that much of a fan of emojis, because I only use them when necessary. I’m not .

As at February, there are 2,283 emojis. And around mid-last year, it was reported that there were over five billion emojis sent every day. And that’s only on Facebook Messenger... we have one Shigetaka Kurita to thank