Social media applications, well most of them, come with the option for instant messaging and typing comments on the pictures, videos and other posts that you notice. Even when you are off social media, you have the option of sending text messages to other people. These text messages and instant messages used to be based on letters only. However, as technology increased a new form of texting and instant messaging emerged. While you have the option of adding special characters in with your text messages and social network communication, you can now add something special to go with the text. Actually, you do not even have to type a message to express what you wish to say. Instead, in the last five years of your online interactions you must have noticed smiley faces with various expressions. You can simply use these when you do not feel like talking and they really set the mood right. But where did these emoji come from and why have they become so popular amongst people of all age? Well before we move on with our infinite questions about emoji and why they exist, consider a picture. Imagine you were talking with your friend and your conversation turned pretty serious. However, since things toughened up you simply wanted to lighten them up so you and your friend could share a laugh and take a break. So, you make a hilarious joke which would require a little thinking before your friend gets it. You type this clever joke and then you hit send to let them receive and read your peace of literature. However, once they are done reading it they are unable to understand whether you were being a complete idiot or you were simply being funny. You see, if in this scenario you had used emoji, things just might have been different and in a few minutes, you will understand why!
You might think that these characters might be the most popular among teenagers and the newer generation. However, the truth is that regardless of which age group people are as long as they are up to date with their technology, they must be using emoji along with their messages with other people. You make use of these silly and whimsical smiley faces for a lot of reasons. These smiley faces with various expressions can help you express your feelings; whether you feel sick, you feel happy, you feel tough, you feel like you made a really cool joke, you are plain angry with your friend or whether you just feel like being silly. These just allow you to show how you are right now because the other person is unable to notice your facial expressions. You can even call people names without typing the actual words. If you feel like telling them they look like death in their recent picture, all you need to do is use the zombie emoji or the skull emoji from your emoji keyboard and they should get your message! If you think no one uses emoji characters in their day to day conversations, you might just be underestimating one of the biggest and long lasting trends of the internet. These characters are huge among social media users and in fact emoji are used for millions if not billions of times each day and they are globally popular as well. Basically, anyone with a mobile device or a personal device will know about them!
While you have understood what emoji are used for, you might still not be clear about what they are. But, before we clear that out you should know that there is a fine difference between emoji and emoticons. You see, emoticons have been around you for a way longer time than emoji and emoticons are made up of keyboard characters instead of proper smiley face; for example, 🙂 (Happy), 🙁 (Sad), :/ (Confused) and so on. On the other hand, emoji are more graphical in nature and these images are very carefully and specially designed for their purpose. That is a very obvious difference that you should consider.
There is another type of reaction tools that were using back in the 1990s and they might still be popular among its most loyal users. These are called Wingdings. These were started by Microsoft and they used symbols to help people express their feelings and so on. Still, they were quite unsuccessful and today they have vanished from the consciousness of majority of us. They were also similar to emoji but they were still not it. Now the original emoji were a design created by one person and they were then incorporated into our global protocol standard. After that happened, other artists and graphic designers began their operations to create their own emoji as well. Then we began using these characters by various companies and artists around the world with different styles and flairs. And with today’s date the trend of using these characters and creating them has snowballed and now we have a variety of millions of various emoji that includes a very wide collection of expressions that you can use. They are now not just limited to yellow smiley faces. You have emoji of fruits, food, cars, flags, people, life situations, common signs, and so on. You might just see the trend of making real life emoji pillows that everyone from around the world are buying because these characters have just begun to integrate with our life so much!
Prepare to be shocked now when you find out the true origin of emoji. This word might not bring out a very English vibe and there is a reason for that. These characters are actually Japanese and according to Android and the Unicode Consortium, globalization has really played its part in bringing an oversees way of communication to the world and it has now become a standardized way for communicating by everyone and it is used by many of us! Now the original designer, creator and owner of emoji icons is Shigetaka Kurita who worked as an enterprising engineer at a hugely successful Japanese cell provider, NTT DoCoMo. He actually designed a batch of Japanese Manga like mages to be used along with text messages that we all type. These were created so that they could help people express their different emotions and various ideas with others. He created these when he was working on i-mode, a Japanese take on mobile wireless connection.
The thing is, if you look at the Japanese language it includes a lot of long-winded letters and they are mainly honorifics in the beginning while the point of the conversation comes in much later. The regular Japanese language then does not work well with text messages and instant messaging so these emoji were a solution by Kurita. A single icon basically sums up an emotional expression and so you convey your feeling much faster and do not have to get stuck in the medium of letter constraints. If you break down the word “emoji” you will notice that the E comes from picture and moji stands for character. All of happened back in 1999 and soon after Unicode Consortium began standardizing these Japanese protocols that they had not had the chance to come across before.
While this is how emoji were discovered in Japan, how did they travel all the way to America then? Basically the Unicode Consortium made the decision to include these niche characters within their protocol standards but completely forgot about them until Apple began functioning in 2007. Apple basically wanted a way to show that iPhone is notoriously tough than Japanese technology and so they needed a secret weapon to prove their point. So, in the latest iOS, Apple included emoji and from then on things changed pretty fast. More and more people began using these characters and from then on more and more people started becoming aware of them. As soon as the fire set, others began to adopt the emoji trend. From Apple, Android adopted emoji and then Microsoft phones began introducing them as well. After that these characters became very common among all electronic devices. Soon after Apple actually lost the leverage it created as it was not the only phone with emoji keyboard. This head start took the trend back to Japanese market as well. But really, even though Apple wished to use these characters as leverage against Japanese market, they were using Japanese inventions against Japanese. Pretty comical, is it not?
Now the last thing we would like to tell you is that while these icons mean the same across the different creators, at times the interpretation can differ from company to company. The graphics might change a little depending on the artist who created them so it would just be better if you are safe with the context you use them with. Because we will just warn you here, emoji are being used for sexting a lot these days. So if you get a peach emoji by someone, do not just think they are offering you fruit!
Cybil 
Emma