History Of Emoji | How - When - Whom |

Emoji are largely used nowadays in internet world. Mainly, they are used in social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp, Instagram etc. They are said to express the extra feelings of the sender.


Based on the internet research, there are total of 722 emojis on standard Unicode 6.0. But with the release of standard Unicode 7.0, more set of emojis have been released too. Specially, the character and symbols are combined together to obtain a emoji. For example, :P results to tongue emoji whereas :O results to surprised emoji.


History of Emojis :
                           

As per the various surveys resulted from internet surfing emojis were discovered in Japan in 1999 AD. A person named Shigetaka Kurita who was a part of mobile internet platform creator company developed this emoji. Those emojis were initially used in the NTT DoCoMo , au and Vodafone. Later on from 2010 AD these emojis were incorporated with Unicode and made easy for use.

Shigetaka Kurita : Creator of Emoji

Research has shown that emoji are often misunderstood. In some cases, this is related to how the actual emoji design is interpreted by the viewer, in other cases, the emoji that was sent is not shown in the same way on the receiving side.

The first issue relates to the cultural or contextual interpretation of the emoji. When the author picks an emoji, they think about it in a certain way, but the same character may not trigger the same thoughts in the mind of the receiver.

For example, people in China have developed a system for using emoji subversively, so that a smiley face could be sent to convey a despising, mocking, and even obnoxious attitude, as the orbicularis oculi (the muscle near that upper eye corner) on the face of the emoji does not move, and the orbicularis oris (the one near the mouth) tightens, which is believed to be a sign of suppressing a smile.

The second problem, on the other hand, has to do with technology and branding. When an author of a message picks an emoji from a list, it is normally encoded in a non-graphical manner during the transmission, and if the author and the reader do not use the same software or operating system for their devices, the reader's device may visualize the same emoji in a different way. Small changes to a character's look may completely alter its perceived meaning with the receiver.