Growing out of the ground? When the subcomittee comes to a consensus, a new emoji can be born. As the emoji vocabulary began to grow, some people wondered why certain images were privileged over others. Why were there half a dozen icons to describe sushi, but zero tacos, burritos, or enchiladas?
There were a growing number of emoji professionals—doctors, chefs, policemen—but why did they all appear to be men? And why, among the many different emoji representing humans, were all of them white people? By , the Great Emoji Politicization had begun. It happened with emoji representing food there were none depicting traditional African cuisine, like injera or fufu , flags the Israeli flag existed, but not the Palestinian one , families debates about family units depicting same-sex parents or single parents , and more.
In , Unicode took its first big step toward diversifying emoji by introducing the option to change the skin tone on people emoji, along with additions to include more types of people doing more types of things. Since then, every update has included incremental steps toward diversifying the types of people and cultures represented on the emoji keyboard: female surfers and cyclists, women with hard hats and stethoscopes, people wearing turbans and hijabs.
Most recently, Unicode has taken steps toward creating gender-neutral emoji, emoji that represent people with disabilities, and other symbols to represent the full spectrum of emoji users. The Unicode Consortium considers new emoji every year, which means the cultural lexicon of emoji continues to evolve with every update to iOS and Android. An update that reached screens in included mythical creatures mermaids, genies, elves, and vampires , food pie, sandwich, broccoli, takeout , animals dinosaur, hedgehog, giraffe, zebra , and faces starstruck, mindblown, shhhing, and expletive-spouting angry face.
Perhaps more importantly, the update also added half a dozen new ways to represent humans: a woman cradling a baby, a woman wearing a hijab, and three new gender-neutral options to represent people at all ages.
A new set of emoji from added the options to give emoji gray or red hair, as well as new cultural symbols like a mooncake and a nazar amulet. Most recently, emoji additions include symbols for deaf people, people in wheelchairs, and couples with mixed genders and skin tones. A trend that started as a few expressive cartoon faces is now a full-blown phenomenon in which users can choose from thousands of tiny emojis to express all sorts of complex feelings and ideas.
Emojis aren't just cutesy texting for teens — they are a style of language all their own. Emojis are not the first human effort to add emotion to text.
That honor goes to emoticons , which blend a variety of the characters found on your keyboard to create a visual representation of a facial expression such as :- or :- for a for a happy face or sad face, respectively.
Emoticons have been around in the computer world for decades, alerting message recipients to the presence of sarcasm or sadness or irony. Emoticons have an actual start date. On Sept. This was to prevent some all-too-common misunderstandings and ensuing arguments. The practice soon spread to other colleges and then to the wider world [source: Steinmetz ]. Of course, people were scrawling smiley faces in hand-written letters way before that. Some historians even point to a Robert Herrick poem titled "To Fortune," in which the writer seems to have purposely included an emoticon in one line: "Upon my ruins, smiling yet :.
Emojis are simply an evolution of the emoticon. They're icons in place of ASCII or alphanumeric characters or punctuation, colorful pictograms standing in for older, boring monochrome manifestations. It all started in , when a Japanese company called NTT DoCoMo introduced two little icons — a phone and a heart— that users could send via its fabulously popular Pocket Bell pagers. The phone icon indicated that you wanted to talk on the phone, and the heart, of course hopefully denoted affection of some type [source: Ford ].
Later in the '90s, DoCoMo streamlined its pager offering, ditching the cutesy icons, which were a distraction from its business-centric product. It didn't take long for DoCoMo to realize it'd driven off one of its vital customer bases [source: Blagdon ].
Fortunately for DoCoMo, one of the company's engineers, Shigetaka Kurita, was working on an early mobile internet platform called "i-mode," which was meant to share information like news and stock market data. He realized that it would be easier to communicate certain types of information, like weather, via tiny graphic symbols like clouds for overcast days or a sun symbol for clear days , especially because i-mode restricted messages to a maximum of characters [source: Kageyama ].
In , inspired by necessity and deadlines, Kurita developed a series of initial icons for the new i-mode platform. The library of teensy icons featured simple symbols for food, drink, weather, sports, love and a lot more. Kurita called his little pictograms "emoji," derived from the Japanese words "e" picture and "moji" character.
Then, it was just a matter of figuring out how to transmit the symbols without bogging down phones [source: Galloway ]. Data networks in the late '90s and early s were too slow to send emojis as individual image files. So instead, the 12 x pixel images were preloaded onto DoCoMo phones. When senders created new messages, the data for emoji were represented by just 2 bytes, which corresponded to the appropriate icon on the recipient's phone.
The result was a picture-driven conversation that didn't require a lot of slow and expensive data usage [source: Blagdon ]. As years passed, more icons emerged, but they didn't work properly between different devices and cell service providers. When a sender meant to send a thumbs-up symbol, the recipient might instead receive a thumbs-down. What emojis really needed was some form of standardization. In , in stepped the Unicode Consortium, a non-profit group of technology companies and tech-savvy volunteers who have a vast understanding of linguistics.
It created a standardized library of picture characters available for Android and iOS devices, as well as Windows and Apple computer operating systems. The exact artwork for particular icons differs depending on the platform, but the meaning is similar. The end result was a nearly universal system for communicating via tiny cartoon images [sources: Warren , Emojipedia ].
As of , there are more than 2, emoji listed in the Unicode Standard. Each year, though, the Unicode Consortium reviews about proposals for new icons. Promising symbols are uploaded to the Unicode Web site for public review, to weed out any that may be inappropriate or too specific. As a contextual cue, emoji can help users establish an emotional tone, reduce the ambiguity of semantic expression and improve appropriateness relative to context Kaye et al.
There are two aspects of emoji usage preference. One is users' selection of emoji content and the other is the degree to which there is a match between emotions expressed by emoji and real sentiments. For example, users in different countries introduce elements which are representative of their countries into emoji Sadiq et al. In the field of linguistics, research focuses on the pragmatic functions of emoji and the possibility that they could become an independent language.
Emoji have been identified as having semantic properties, and can be used both as an independent language and as a component of a paralanguage providing users with a means of communication and promoting speech acts and interaction Jibril and Abdullah, ; Alshenqeeti, ; Na'aman et al. There are pros and cons regarding whether emoji can become an independent language.
An application was developed to verify the possibility of emoji-first communication Khandekar et al. Other researchers think emoji can't be regarded as an independent language because their meaning largely depends on surrounding text, and only when they are combined with the text can complete semantics be expressed Zhou et al.
Studies in this field mainly focus on two aspects. One is the relationship between individual psychological characteristics and emoji usage, and the other is the introduction of emoji into the scale design and the implementation of new psychological measurement tools. Emoji usage was found to be closely related to some psychological traits such as the big five personality traits, self-monitoring, emotional stress, and others Derks et al.
For example, research has shown that frequency of emoji use correlates with emotional stability, extroversion and agreeableness in the big five personality traits, but not with conscientiousness and openness Li et al. At the same time, some studies have attempted to introduce emoji into psychometric scales and have achieved good results in actual measurements Marengo et al.
In the field of medicine and public health, studies on emoji mainly focus on correcting personal behavior and improving doctor-patient communication.
Emoji can be used to guide people's behavior regarding health, and it has been shown that using emoji can reinforce correct behavior when it comes to hand hygiene monitoring Gaube et al. Furthermore, using emoji can improve communication between doctors and patients and also enhance patients' abilities to manage their own health Balas et al.
Some researchers suggest developing a set of emoji specifically to be used for patient care, which could help patients better understand and communicate the challenges they face in health management Skiba, In addition, emoji can be used for the identification and prediction of mental illness due to their strength in emotional expression.
Marengo et al. In the field of education, research focuses on the impact of emoji on learning efficiency. It has been found that the use of emoji in classroom activities will help students better understand what they have learned Brody and Caldwell, , especially in computer-mediated teaching online learning Dunlap et al. Emoji can help young children understand abstract concepts such as security, interpersonal management and emotions and also improve their ability to express themselves Fane, ; Fane et al.
Understanding users' real emotions when they use emoji is important for future research. At present, it is difficult to accurately measure participants' true reactions through self-reporting. Categorizing emotions by amassing a corpus using big data is unable to depict users' complex emotions such as are expressed by emoji at a more detailed level, for example emotions such as shame, anger and so on.
Therefore, we hold the opinion that in the future, researchers can use some psychological methods in the corpus test to measure the physiological indexes of participants with professional equipment such as nuclear magnetic resonance, electroencephalography and multipurpose polygraphs to depict users' real emotions more accurately. Future research could also benefit from a more qualitative approach, such as interviews and case studies to learn about emoji use in the context of real-world communication.
In practice, some researchers suggest that video and screen shots can be used in concrete operations to observe and record users' choices of emoji during communication Gibson et al. We believe that observing whether users' actual facial expressions differ from their selected emoji emotionally in communication can help researchers understand users' psychological mechanism in communication.
At present, research focuses on the description of users' preference for emoji, but fails to go deeply into the underlying reasons. Users' preferences for emoji are influenced by many factors such as contextual information, interpersonal relationships, familiarity with emoji and personal interpretations other than official definitions, which are all worthwhile factors to explore.
The emergence and widespread use of stickers has impacted the status of emoji, and some research has begun to improve the user experience of stickers Shi et al. Whether stickers will replace emoji is an interesting topic for researchers. Under the impact of stickers, how to further enhance emoji's performance in emotion and semantic expression and improve user experience is also a direction worth exploring. As part of popular culture, the development and use of emoji reflects specific political and cultural characteristics.
Many researchers have interpreted emoji's social influence from different perspectives. For example, some uncivilized use of emoji can harm public consciousness, a point which is not yet appreciated by the public Zerkina et al. Other researchers believe that the popularity of emoji reflects multicultural communication and cultural globalization Skiba, , and that there is some unconscious power behind the use of non-verbal cues like emoji Elder, , which strengthen the inequality and exploitation of our social system Stark and Crawford, For example, Leslie argues that the quantitative use of emoji in the workplace such as the use of emoji to give ratings has turned the employee into something like an on-the-shelf item in a digital economy warehouse, affecting their freedom.
The democratization of emoji selection and Unicode should also be discussed. Emoji of different skin colors have been introduced to address the lack of racial representation Sweeney and Whaley, Therefore, future research can explore the deeper meaning of emoji use from different perspectives, especially the links between emoji use and political movements, subcultural groups, and social inequality. This paper systematically reviews related research on emoji, aiming to provide a global perspective and clues for researchers interested in emoji.
This paper summarizes the developmental process, usage features, functional attributes, and fields of research related to emoji. Emoji developed from emoticons, and have both emotional and semantic functions. The use of emoji is influenced by and varies according to factors such as individual circumstances, culture, and platforms.
Ambiguity and misunderstanding may occur in different situations and cultural backgrounds. From the perspective of many fields communication, computing, behavioral science, marketing, and education , this paper comprehensively combs the research topics, methods and tools used in studies related to emoji, systematically summarizes the research status of emoji in various fields, and puts forward some new perspectives for future emoji research such as emotional association, use preference, new modalities and impacts on society.
The datasets generated for this study are available on request to the corresponding author. QB contributed conception and design of the study. All authors contributed to manuscript revision, read, and approved the submitted version. The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. Ai, W. Google Scholar. Al Rashdi, F. Functions of emojis in WhatsApp interaction among Omanis.
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Gaube, S. How a smiley protects health: a pilot intervention to improve hand hygiene in hospitals by activating injunctive norms through emoticons. Consider the " ". That character was already commonly included on typewriters manufactured in the United States in the first half of the 20th century. Back in the s, in the "ancient" history of computers, it was encoded in ASCII as the commercial at sign.
Email had not really even been invented. This particular symbol got picked up for other uses, including marking identifiers in some programming languages. Today, the most common use is in email addresses: chris example. That change in function could not have been anticipated, but such changes occur all the time for various symbols—including, of course, emoji symbols. Software still clearly identifies it as the same character today, some 50 years after its first use with computers.
A: When new characters are added to the Unicode Standard, they are added in a way that does not invalidate anything in the prior versions of the standard. This is called forward compatibility. Everyone developing any kind of computing system, from laptops to phones to some future quantum computing cyborg implant has very strong incentives to ensure that is the case.
Even larger volumes of data are generated and maintained in servers and computers not directly visible on the internet. There are vast, growing quantities of such data. It would require a complete collapse of the information technology structure worldwide for all that stored information to suddenly become uninterpretable.
The Unicode data is actually much more robust and stable than the particular hardware it might be stored on in any given decade. Q: Where can I find out more? I have an emoji question not answered here. A: Unicode provides a number of emoji resources which provides more information about emoji.
In particular, Unicode Emoji TR 51 outlines many details of the entire emoji set. For questions about new emoji proposals or why a certain emoji does not exist, please see the Emoji Submission FAQ. Once an emoji code point has been added to the Unicode Standard, it cannot be removed per the Unicode Stability Policy.
There have been limited instances where the emoji status of a character or sequence has changed over time, and some vendors may choose to only display a subset of the emoji Recommended for General Interchange.
As most emoji have multiple uses and meanings in various contexts, Unicode generally does not become involved in discussion of removing an emoji. Frequently Asked Questions. Tech Site Site Map Search. Emoji and Pictographs Why is there no emoji for X? How do I propose a new emoji? What are emoji? What is the plural of emoji? Where can I find out more about emoji in Unicode? Are emoji the same thing as emoticons? What is the difference between emoji and pictographs?
What are the most popular emoji characters? Can you point me to some examples of emoji characters in Unicode? Do emoji characters have to look the same wherever they are used? What about diversity? How were emoji originally encoded in Unicode? Do emoji have one and only one meaning? Does the Unicode character name define the meaning of an emoji character?
How many emoji characters are in Unicode now? Will more emoji characters be added?
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