The Emoji: Where the Past and Future Collide

Today, emojis are everywhere. We use them for everything — from consoling friends to ordering pizzas. But for most of us, these cute little images are a relatively new thing. So, I did some research to find out more and the story of the emoji’s success is a fascinating one. And it has its roots in the social, psychological and service design fields. So Let’s take a look.

I’ll admit — I thought emoji was slang for emotion. So, I was surprised to learn it’s Japanese for “picture” (e) and “character” (mo-ji). The first emojis were invented by Shigetaka Kurita in the late 90’s. He was tasked with finding an innovative solution for delivering the Japanese language via text communication. As you can imagine, fitting 2k+ katakana and kanji symbols on a 90’s cellphone pad was not realistic. Users scrolled to find their characters and had to combine them. So when Kurita came up with 170+ everyday nouns, emotions and expressions that could be used instead, the ease factor was there.

When it stops turning, you do need to reinvent a wheel

This story fascinates me for a number of reasons, but mainly because Kurita didn’t attempt to reinvent the cellphone to make it more Japanese friendly — he essentially reinvented the text people used. He retrained an entire generation of users and did so by offering them an easier option.

But how did the emoji end up with us? Was it a couple of returning English teachers bringing back more than just the typical Katana sword? No, of course not. It was Apple trying to break into the Japanese market. In 2007 they released an update with a ‘hidden’ emoji set which could only be unlocked if the phone was using Japanese. Users starting hacking their phones and based on this demand in 2011, Apple began to support emojis internationally.

But many people ask — so are emojis just a fad? Because after all, we don’t have the same issues with text communication as the Japanese do — the Qwerty keyboard uses the Roman alphabet and English is still a Lingua Franca. However, the problems the Japanese were facing with communicating via text are exactly the same ones as ours.

In Japanese, honorifics and complex expressions are used to communicate emotions in written and verbal form. In English, we rely heavily on facial gestures, intonation, pauses and other contextual cues to communicate effectively. Without these, our language is surprisingly bland. Simply put, emojis aid communication.

Futuristic communication with its roots in the past

But while we were all socially motivated to add a happy or winky face at the end of a text to suggest intonation and gestures, the use of emojis has since gone way beyond that. We can now use them to order food on Fooji via Twitter and a range of fast food places.

However, taking the emoji out of its social context and into a business transaction is not without its hurdles. Emojis only add value in these contexts when a language barrier exists, or their implementation is clearly easier than text, i.e. if we don’t know the word, we can use the symbol. Again, this is the case with hanzi and kanji (the character crossover in Chinese and Japanese). For centuries, the two nationalities have been able to communicate textually using a common character system, which pronounces the word used differently. This system still exists today. Imagine if we had a written language that was the same all over the world, only spoken differently depending on whether you were in France, Australia or India. How easy business and friendship around the world could be. Well, you don’t have to imagine — because this is exactly what the emoji langue does.

In short, we crave simplicity and the ability to communicate with others. And when a tool such as the emoji comes along which is already well developed and used by millions — it is any wonder why it’s so popular?