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July 17 is celebrated as “World Emoji Day” every year to celebrate a wide range of emoji, which we use daily to communicate our messages and emotions efficiently. Before the arrival of emojis, emojis were used. Emoticons are a combination of emotions and icons in which characters are arranged sequentially to express our emotions. Different emoticons are used for different emotions, like happy emotions are shown as :) and frown emotions are shown as :( and many other emoticons are created using keyboard characters. But Shigetaka Kurita, who is considered the creator of the emoji, thought of something different from emoticons to express feelings or fill cues in communication through pictures. This led to the invention of emojis. Initially, Kurita created graphic phrases to attract teenagers when she was employed by the Japanese telecom company NTT Docomo.
History: Emoticons are used in digital communication, like online conversations, and are the source of emojis. The 1995 Pocket Bell pager's heart sign is considered the first-ever emoji. Shigetka Kurita, then inspired by Japanese comics, created the first set of emojis in 1999. Initially, emojis were usable in Japan, but afterward, they were added to the Unicode standard, which led to widespread usage of them. In 2007, it became popular when Apple introduced emojis on iPhones. Further, emojis of various skin tones were introduced to promote diversity and inclusivity. Different categories were included, from cuisine to transportation, to foster effective digital communication. Now, on World Emoji Day, Emojipedia, in collaboration with Zedge, has announced the world’s most popular emoji, in which the “Head-Shaking Horizontal” emoji is at the top, followed by “Head-Shaking Vertically.”
Significance: - Every year, we celebrate this day to mark the importance of emojis in our lives and promote their use to communicate effectively. We communicate digitally with different types of people daily and sometimes face challenges in expressing our emotions quickly. Here, the emojis play a major role. It fills up the cues in communication and fosters the effective delivery of messages and emotions to the receiver. Every day, human beings use several emojis in texts or social media posts to express their feelings. Emojis are accessible, adaptable, and interpretable for everyone. We have multiple categories of emojis like cuisine, transportation, flowers, animals, weather, mood, etc.
Emojis are colorful pictures that serve as a replacement for non-verbal communication. In non-verbal communication, facial expressions, gestures, and different body languages are used to express our underlying message. However, with the evolution of emojis, there is a replacement for non-verbal cues in digital communication. We can use emojis, which have different pictorial representations of different emotions. Using facial pictographs of different emotions, such as happiness, sadness, or other emotions, we can express ourselves easily alongside written text or social media posts. Not just facial pictographs; there are a range of emojis that serve as an effective tool in digital communication.
