HOW EMOJIS CAME

Emojis first appeared on the scene in the late 1990’s in Japan, where mobile phone companies, inspired by symbols used in manga comics and Japanese weather forecasts, attempted to fill an opening in the burgeoning mobile phone marketplace: The teenaged children of the Hello Kitty generation.

The word “emoji”, in fact, is just as Japanese as it sounds. It’s taken from the Japanese words “e” (“picture”), and “moji” (“character”).

However, to trace the true roots of this phenomenon, it is necessary to look even further back into our collective communication history.

During the development of the emoticon throughout the late 1980’s and 1990’s, several distinct, parallel processes developed and refined the art form, based on the keyboard characters available in different regions of the world.

 The internet had become a pervasive influence, email use was growing exponentially and the mobile phone had become an indispensable item.

With this explosion came a growing lexicon of keyboard and digital characters. Allowing emoticon artists to spread their creative wings in increasingly complex ways

Although quite impressive and undeniably cool, such emoticons were too painstaking for common use.

A growing subculture of people going to such lengths to create their own emoticons exposed a gap in the digital marketplace, which many were clamouring to fill.

In 1998, the emoji was born.

Shigetaka Kurita created the first 180 emoji collection for a Japanese mobile web platform, and the concept spread from there.

The emoji proved to meet the needs of the growing mobile cellular phone industry so perfectly, that soon, everyone was in on the act.

Initially, each individual phone, or individual service provider had their own set of emojis. However, compatibility issues arose when communicating from network to network, particularly in different world regions.

The emoji proved to function as an extremely effective linguistic shortcut for those communicating cross culturally, as they visually conveyed complex emotions in a way that everyone could understand.

As global communication became more accessible and common, the desire to utilise the emoji as a part of such communication grew and the need for a unified, standardised emoji set became clear.As emojis become further ingrained in the world of digital communication, they can be expected to appear in more and more areas of the internet and mobile networks, as seen recently with email subject lines.