Hey guys it’s Greg with Apple Explained, and today we’re going to explore the history
of the emoji.
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Now emoji date back to 1999 when they first appeared on Japanese cell phones.
But it’s history goes further than that, because before there were emoji, there were
emoticons.
Emoticons were the pictorial representation of a facial expression by using things like
punctuation marks, numbers, and letters.
The earliest use of emoticons can be traced all the way back to the 17th century when
a Slovak notary used one to indicate his satisfaction with the state of his town's financial records.
In 1862, The New York Times also allegedly used an emoticon in this snippet of a speech
transcript.
And some of the first emoticons representing various moods were publish in an 1881 issue
of Puck magazine.
So it’s clear that using symbols to represent facial expressions isn’t a modern concept,
but it did become more popular with the advent of the computer.
The first American Standard Code for Information Interchange emoticons, or ASCII for short
which is essentially just an encoding standard, were written by Scott Fahlman in 1982, he
thought they’d help people on a message board at Carnegie Mellon to distinguish serious
posts from jokes by using the smiley face and frown face.
And the symbols caught on.
Now at about the same time, Japan was developing emoticons of their own, but they took a different
approach.
Instead of writing emoticons sideways to the direction of the text, users in Japan popularized
a kind of emoticon called kaomoji.
Kao, meaning face, and moji, meaning character, that was written in the same orientation as
the text.
As the internet became widespread in the late 1990s, emoticons became increasingly popular
and were commonly used in text messages, Internet forums and e-mails.
They became so popular, that artist Shigetaka Kurita set out to create true visual symbols
that could replace emoticon.
Kurita worked on the development team for “i-mode,” an early mobile internet platform
from Japan’s main mobile carrier, DOCOMO.
Kurita wanted to design an attractive interface to convey information in a simple, clear way.
Like an icon to show the weather forecast rather than spelling out the word “cloudy.”
He took inspiration from Chinese characters, street signs, and symbols used in manga and
sketched a set of 12x12-pixel images that could be selected from a keyboard-like grid
within the i-mode interface, then sent on mobile phones and pagers as their own individual
characters.
Kurita’s original 176 emoji—now part of a permanent collection at New York’s Museum
of Modern Art—favored symbols over faces, because DOCOMO’s goal was to find new ways
to express information.
There were characters to show the weather (sun, clouds, umbrella, snowman), traffic
(car, tram, airplane, ship), technology (landline, cell phone, TV, GameBoy), and all the phases
of the moon.
It was the beginning of a new visual language.
Emoji were an instant success in Japan and rival companies like AU and SoftBank each
created their own set of emoji less than a year later.
The problem was each company’s emoji were proprietary, so using them across carries
could get a bit hairy.
As mobile computing continued to explode throughout the mid-2000s, companies outside Japan, like
Apple, saw an opportunity to incorporate emoji on their platforms.
In 2007, a software internationalization team at Google decided to lead the effort, petitioning
to get emoji recognized by the Unicode Consortium, a nonprofit group that works sort of like
the United Nations to maintain text standards across computers.
Now you may be wondering what exactly the Unicode Consortium is responsible for.
Well, since software is built on code, every letter or character you type on a computer
is “encoded” or represented by a numerical code.
Before Unicode, there were hundreds of different encoding systems, which meant different computers
and servers didn’t always represent text the same way.
The purpose of Unicode was to standardize these codes for international communication,
so that the letters you typed in English, Chinese, or any other language, showed up
accurately across platforms and across devices.
The Google team—Kat Momoi, Mark Davis, and Markus Scherer—noticed emoji’s ascent
in Japan and argued that emoji should fall under the same standard.
In 2009, a pair of Apple engineers, Yasuo Kida and Peter Edberg, joined in and submitted
an official proposal to adopt 625 new emoji characters into the Unicode Standard.
Unicode accepted the proposal in 2010, a decision that would make emoji accessible everywhere.
Unicode ultimately decided to index emoji “because of their use as characters for
text-messaging in a number of Japanese manufacturers’ corporate standards.”
What that means is: Emoji had become too popular to ignore and unicode was going beyond just
accepting a proposal to establish standards for emoji—it was the beginning of legitimizing
emoji as a form of communication.
They were on their way to becoming a language.
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In the mid-2000s, few companies outside of Japan had created their own emoji keyboards,
but users could still access them with third party apps, which let users copy and paste
the icons into text messages and emails.
But due to compatibility issues, the recipient may have seen a question mark instead of the
intended emoji.
In 2011, Apple added an official emoji keyboard to iOS, and Android followed suit two years
later.
This allowed people to access emoji directly from a keyboard on their phones, the same
way you’d switch to a Korean or Japanese keyboard to access those language-specific
characters.
The keyboard also popularized emoji with an entirely new audience.
The New York Times suggested the move could give emoji a shot at “mainstream success,”
noting that young people were already adjusting their texting habits to include the icons.
As emoji became more popular, they also became more plentiful.
The Unicode Consortium added new emoji to its approved list each year, gathered from
users around the world: the first emoji bride, dozens of plants and animals, types of food,
and depictions of all kinds of activities.
Unicode requires a lengthy submission and approval process for every new batch hoping
for admission, and it can take up to two years for an emoji to travel from the artists sketchpad
to your phone.
First, new emoji are suggested through a formal proposal to the Unicode Consortium.
But these proposals required an explanation of why the emoji should be adopted and ideas
for how it might look.
Considerations of the design is more complex than you might think.
If there’s going to be an emoji to represent “beans,” should they be black beans?
Refried beans?
Lima beans?
How about green beans?
Should they be in a can?
Or should they be in a bowl?
Maybe they’re growing out of the ground?
Once the user specifies every last detail and justifies the design, the proposal is
examined by the Unicode Consortium’s emoji subcommittee, which meets twice a week to
discuss and decide on all emoji-related matters.
When the subcommittee comes to a consensus, the new emoji is officially born.
As the list of emoji began to grow, some people wondered why certain things were favored over
others.
Why were there six icons to represent sushi, but none for tacos, burritos, or enchiladas?
There were a lot of occupational emoji like doctors, chefs, and police, but why were they
all men?
And why were all the human emoji white people?
By 2014, the emoji had become political.
It happened with emoji representing food, flags, families, and more.
For example, traditional African cuisine wasn’t included, the Israeli flag was featured, but
not the Palestinian one, and there weren’t any families that represented single parents
or same-sex couples.
It wasn’t just about having the right icon to describe what you ate for lunch, it was
about having a digital representation of your culture.
In 2015, Unicode took its first step toward diversifying emoji by introducing the option
to change the skin tone on emoji representing people, along with additions to include more
types of people doing more types of things.
Since then, every update has included incremental steps toward diversifying the types of people
and cultures represented in the emoji keyboard: female surfers and cyclists, women with hard
hats and stethoscopes, and people wearing turbans and hijabs, just to name a few.
Unicode has also taken steps recently toward creating gender-neutral emoji, and other symbols
to represent the full spectrum of emoji users.
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Now, emoji are prone to being misunderstood just like any other language.
And that’s mainly for two reasons.
First, is how the design is interpreted by the reader.
When the artist creates an emoji, they think about its design in a certain way, but it
may not evoke the same thoughts in others.
And some of this is cultural.
For example, the Sleepy Face symbol could easily be misunderstood for a tear emoji by
people in the west who aren’t familiar with anime and manga which uses snot bubbles to
indicate a character is sleeping.
The second reason behind potential confusion is that each platform uses a slightly different
design to represent an emoji.
So an emoji you send from an iPhone will appear slightly different on an android device, but
in recent years efforts have been made to establish consistent designs across platforms.
Some emoji have even caused arrests and imprisonments due to their perceived meanings.
Apparently the gun 🔫, knife 🗡, and bomb 💣 emoji were used in ways that were found
to be credible threats by authorities.
And these sort of incidents prompted discussion among legal experts on whether or not emoji
could be used as evidence in court trials, an issue still being debated today.
In 2016, Apple announced that the gun emoji in iOS 10 would change from a realistic revolver
to a water gun, and by 2018 most major platforms including Google, Microsoft, Samsung, Facebook,
and Twitter had altered their pistol emoji to match Apple's water gun design.
And along with the gun, Apple planned on updating the peach emoji in iOS 10 since it was being
used more often as something other than a peach.
But the redesign was met with fierce backlash in beta testing and Apple reversed their decision
by the time iOS 10 was available to the public.
Now The Unicode Consortium considers new emoji every year, which means the vocabulary of
emoji continues to evolve with every update to iOS and Android.
Recent additions, which appeared in 2017, included mythical creatures (mermaids, genies,
elves, and vampires), food (pie, sandwich, broccoli, takeout), animals (dinosaur, hedgehog,
giraffe, zebra), and faces (starstruck, mindblown, shhhing, and expletive-spouting angry face).
The update also added new ways to represent humans: There’s a woman cradling a baby,
a woman wearing a hijab, and three new gender-neutral options to represent people of all ages.
A set of emoji proposals approved earlier this year also added the options to give emoji
gray or red hair, as well as new cultural symbols like a mooncake and a nay-zar amulet.
And because of consistent technological progress, emoji are becoming even more capable and customizable.
Like with Apple’s Animoji, which uses the iPhone X’s Face Tracking technology to animate
an emoji using a person’s facial expressions.
For now, the feature only works with select emoji, but one day it could potentially include
every emoji with a face.
The next batch of emoji will depend on what people design and submit to The Unicode Consortium.
It’s something anyone can do, and like I said before, they require a prototype of the
emoji, an explanation of how and why people would use it, and what its addition would
mean for the greater emoji language.
If you’d like to propose an emoji of your own, you can read more about the requirements
and submission process on Unicode’s website.
But what kind of emoji do you want to see in the next Unicode update?
I’d personally enjoy a yawning face and maybe more animals, but let me know what you
think in the comments.
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Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you next time.