Fond of texting? You’re likely familiar with emojis, the encompassing term for all those little smileys and symbols that you can send along with your message. The thing is, the beginnings of what would eventually become emojis go further back in the past than you probably think.
To really understand what they are and why they’re so important to communication today, we’re going to have to hop in a time machine back to the 19th century.
You read that right—this history lesson begins before the world even saw computers.
Early Forms of Telecommunication
The first electrical telecommunications system was the electrical telegraph. Though not the first person to conceptualize it, English inventor Francis Ronalds was the first person able to put together a system that actually worked.
Many other innovators would improve his design after him. But people weren’t able to send all 26 of the letters in the English alphabet and the ten Arabic numerals until Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail came along.
The pair developed Morse code, a set of standardized sequences wherein you form each symbol with a series of dots and dashes (dits and dahs). You send messages by beeping them to a receiver. There are short and long signals, as well as pauses between letters.
While both the telegraph and Morse code are milestones in human history, they needed to be streamlined. The telegraph, depending on whose iteration you were using, had a lot of complicated moving parts. Letters in Morse code had different signal lengths, making it tricky to determine when each one ended.
A hundred years would pass before humanity would get an upgrade. We finally had automatic decoders, teleprinters, and a more understandable code. Instead of sending streams of long signals and pauses (where you would have to be very careful about the duration of each one), you could send a series of off and on signals called bits. Every character had the same signal length of five bits long.
Unfortunately, there are times where, in solving a problem, you create another. A bit could only be either zero or one, and so there were only 32 (2⁵) possible characters you could send at the time.
What is ASCII?
ASCII stands for the American Standard Code for Information Interchange and was first advertised by the American National Standards Institute in 1963. It allowed seven bits instead of five, and thus, several characters that computers did not have before were introduced. Namely, escape (ESC), backslash (), and curly brackets ({}).
Lots of folks were behind the creation of ASCII, but no one worked on it as much as computer scientists Bob Bemer and Hugh McGregor Ross. In fact, when ASCII was first introduced in Europe, it was called the Bemer-Ross Code. People started referring to Bemer as the Father of ASCII.
ASCII was the most common character encoding on the World Wide Web until December 2007, when UTF-8 encoding surpassed it. This brings us to much more recent times…
What is Unicode?
Unicode is the information technology standard for text encoding and representation maintained by the Unicode Consortium. It has several types, each of which is referred to as a Unicode Transformation Format (UTF).
Two of the most commonly used encodings are UTF-8 and UTF-16. The numbers in the latter half of their names refer to how many bits compose any one of its characters. UTF-8 is backward compatible with ASCII (sharing the first 126) and is used in over 95% of websites on the internet as of 2020.
The Unicode Consortium published the first version of The Unicode Standard, a set of code charts for visual reference, in 1991. Ever since then, new versions have been published regularly. After receiving feedback from various bodies in the United States, Europe, and Japan, version 6.0 was published in October 2010, defining the emoji for the first time.
Where Does the Word “Emoji” Come From?
The word emoji comes from the Japanese words for “picture” (絵) and “character” (文字), respectively. Its similarity to the English words “emotion” and “emoticon” is a mere coincidence.
How Emojis Have Shaped Modern Communication
According to analytics by Brandwatch, 95 percent of internet users have used an emoji at least once, and over 10 billion emojis are sent every day. It isn’t just millennials, either—almost 76 percent of 25 to 29-year-olds call themselves “frequent” emoji users. 21 percent of that same age group say that they use them “occasionally.”
What began as a successor to emotes has almost become a whole new language in its own right. It’s easy to see the impact that emojis have on the digital culture of today.
Text on a screen obviously misses out on a person’s tone of voice and bodily expressions. Sometimes, it can difficult to pinpoint how a statement is meant to be read. Is the sender being genuine or sarcastic? Are they serious or lighthearted?
Punctuation marks can only go so far, and emojis help ensure that a message is interpreted in the same way as intended. After all, as per the 7-38-55 Rule by psychologist Albert Mehrabian, only 7 percent of the information we receive when talking to someone reflects what they actually say.
The rest comes from how it was said—namely their gestures, intonation, accent, speech rhythm, etc. All of which are completely lost when people are not communicating face-to-face. There’s more to communication than just words.
Emojis have also streamlined the communication process. An emoji can sometimes replace full words and phrases, eating up less of our time. For instance, a thumbs-up can indicate approval or agreement, confirmation of receipt, or simply put an end to a discussion. A message that would normally take a minute or two to type out can now be summarized with a single character.
In fact, a 2015 study by Emogi [PDF] claims that messages communicated online are getting shorter due to the increased use of emojis. Common abbreviations such as LOL and OMG are no longer used as often as they once were.
Messaging is Easier and More Expressive Now
While it may not seem like it, emojis are a result of years of innovation. They aren’t mere pictograms. They represent decades of history: how civilization continued to advance long-distance communication.
We live in a time wherein our loved ones don’t seem so far away, even if they are on the other side of the world, because we can send them a message of any length in an instant.