How Emoji's Become Popular

It's almost impossible to find people who use social media but don't use emojis or emoticons. Emoji is an easy way to express your thoughts without writing too much. According to many, emojis are destroying people's creativity (meaning they are losing their creativity by not expressing their thoughts in writing as a result of using emojis).

However, it can be said that its positive effect is more. It saves us valuable time. However, we use emojis like today, but in the beginning the emojis were not like that. By the way, today's emojis have come through a long evolution.

In 1881, almost 100 years before the birth of our familiar emoji, the emoji's ancient ancestor, the Emoticon, was published in American Humor Magazine. Which were made up of different punctuation marks and typographic characters and carried the meaning of joy, sorrow, suffering etc. However, these were first referred to as ‘typographic art’. Decades later, in the 1990's, it re-emerged as an integral part of communication in chat rooms.

Emoji History–How Emoji become Popular

However, modern emojis have different views on birth (meaning birth year). According to some, the first modern emoji was created by Softbank Mobile Company in 1997. However, the most famous emoji set was created by Shigetaka Kurita of Japan for the famous mobile company DoCoMo.

Kurita created a set of 18-character emojis for Docomo's mobile platform ‘i-mode’ in 1999. Its main purpose was to allow users to express themselves through a set of special characters in a concise way. This wide range of emojis allows digital interlocutors to easily express their emotions. Over the decades, emojis have become popular in Japan.

And seeing the popularity of these emojis, the companies that were Docomo's competitors also started using emojis in their products. The emojis then spread to the United States, when Apple added an official emoji keyboard to their iOS in 2011, and a few years later Android followed in their footsteps. Today, emojis are so prestigious that the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) has preserved the original emoji set of Kurita.

Each year, the Unicode Consortium (a non-profit organization that works to maintain the global text standard on computers) adds hundreds of new emojis to its authorized list. The Unicode Consortium has a subcommittee on Emoji or Emoticons that meets twice a week to agree on all issues related to emoji.

Anyway, in 2014, emoji users noticed that emojis representing any profession (such as: police, detective, school teacher, worker) are all white men. Although emoji was an important means of expressing normal emotions, it was a medium where women or people of different races did not have spontaneous expressions.

And when it reaches the ears of Unicode, they allow the emojis to change the color of the skin and also connect different female professionals. The various cultures of the world are now depicted in numerous emojis. The use of emojis is now often tried to understand the personality of the people. And so it can be said that emojis have now become an international language, which we all can easily understand.