The Japanese Shigetaka Kurita is responsible for creating the first emoji in history back in 1999 ; no more and no less than a miniscule dose of information, but with an enormous amount of meaning.
It would not be until the 2010s when these emojis would practically become characters in a new language whose predecessors, emoticons or smileys , were only used rather sporadically through punctuation marks that tried to show human facial expressions. The funny thing is that this form of expression would arise from the difficulty to distinguish between jokes and serious publications on a digital message board at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania (USA).
As a curiosity, when Professor Scott Fahlman decided to introduce symbols like 🙂 and 🙁 to messages, to clarify their tone, he added a note instructing readers to “read them sideways.” trend throughout college and soon smileys began to have a more obvious meaning. satisfaction and disgust Within months, students at Carnegie Mellon devised their own creative emoticons to express a wider range of emotions P oco later. began to spread over the Internet.
We move forward in time and after a brief evolution with the kaomoji in 1986, the Japanese Shigetaka Kurita would arrive to put his stamp. In 1999, this interface designer set out to create a better way to convey complex meaning over text. Taking inspiration from local road signs and kanjis, (the Japanese sinograms) he created the first collection of 176 emojis for a popular Japanese internet platform that operates under the mobile operator NTT DoCoMo. After witnessing the success of emojis on DoCoMo, other Japanese mobile operators designed their own set of emojis. However , the emojis of each operator were proprietary, so there was no compatibility between operators (something that created a lot of disorder in this aspect because many received text messages with empty spaces); an obstacle that would later be resolved.
The Internet had become a dominant influence, the use of email was growing exponentially and the mobile phone had become an indispensable element . And the emoji proved to meet the needs of the growing mobile phone industry in a way so well that everyone they wanted to be participants.
Finally, a North American company stepped in and started using code points, thus ensuring that even if we were using different devices, we would all see the same emoji. Currently, the Unicode Consortium is the body responsible for code points, and more or less everything related to emojis in general.
Far from being a fad, the emoji has been and is part of the digital lexicon since it exists as such. His rise to fame has been gradual and steady and his roots we have already seen go back hundreds of years.
A curiosity: the word “emoji” comes from the Japanese terms “e” (image) and “moji” (character).
