The History Behind Emoji:
(Hurlburt, 2018, p.15)
Researchers such as Hurlburt often refer to languages of the past that are based in symbols and images such as the Egyptian hieroglyphics, Sumerian cuneiform, and Chinese calligraphy. Associations are also drawn to illustrative styles of writing such as those used by the Aztecs and as seen in illuminated manuscripts during the medieval ages (2018, p.14-15).
More modern day influences on emoji can be traced to 1948 when Popular Mechanics included a full page to “Keyboard Art” that used a variety of punctuation marks. Following this, the smiley (yellow circle with black marks for eyes and smile) had its big outbreak in the mid 1960s and became a part of pop culture representation. The emoticon (emotion and icon) was suggested in 1982 to help show humour and sarcasm in writing and was employed more so for a “practical utility” and is created to Scott E. Fehlman (Stark, 2015, p.2-3).
Emoji originated in Japan in the late 1990s by Shigetaka Kurita. In 2009, Unicode voted to include the first set of emoji which consisted of 674 characters. In 2011, Apple iOS5 updated and automatically installed an emoji keyboard and in 2013 Android did the same (Berard, 2018). These releases marked a big step forward to emoji as they were now a build in part of communication devices.
2015 was marked by the release of skin tone modifiers as a response to public dissatisfaction with the lack of racial diversity. That year also saw the “Like a Girl” campaign created by Always which highlighted gender stereotypes in the lack of representation of female emoji. In 2016 and 2017 changes were made to support gender equality by increasing female representation in professional and activity emoji (Berdard 2018).
The next evolutionary step of emoji are the customizable emoji have since developed in the form of Bitmoji and Memoji. Bitmoji was released by Snapchat in 2017. It allows users to create a version of themselves along with the ability to change outfits. The created avatar is then input to a variety of situations that help to communicated emotional sentiments (similar to how emoji are used). Memoji was released in 2018. Memoji is another customizable function where users pick their features similarly to Bitmoji. Memoji takes it a step further and allows Memoji to mimic facial expressions and mouth movements of the user through a device’s front-facing camera (Leslie, 2019, p.18).
