I 🙋 love ❤️ EMOJIS!! 😩🙌😍

They say that a picture is worth a thousand words.  These days, many of the text messages sent between friends and family utilize tiny pictures, emojis, to communicate ideas and emotions rather than type them out.  In fact, Oxford Dictionaries named (Face With Tears of Joy) its 2015 Word of the year.  Everyone is guilty of indulging in the pleasures of a good emoji at one time or another.  But have you ever stepped back to consider the way emojis are actually successfully sent over sms text?

The first emoji was designed in 1998 in Japan by a man named Shigetaka Kurita, who was working at a Japanese mobile operator company on a team developing their mobile internet platform.  Kurita then developed a full set of 172 12x12 emojis as a part of his company’s mobile messaging service in the hopes of it being a distinguishing feature for his company among the crowded mobile market.  He modeled the facial expressions on real expressions he observed during his daily life in urban Japan. 

 

Shigetaka Kurita, the father of a new generation of communication.

Another motivation to develop these small emojis was that the people of Japan were beginning to send many large pictures to communicate rather than text messages, overwhelming the capability of the telecom companies.  Out of this squeeze, the modern system of emoji sending was born.  Under the hood, something called UNICODE is responsible for our beloved emojis.  UNICODE is an encoding standard that assigns letters, digits, symbols, and, most importantly, emojis, unique numeric values that can be interpreted universally by different machines.  This is why I can successfully send my dad, a Windows phone user, a fire emoji from my iPhone.  It is also why there is no need for the message to be converted to an MMS message containing a picture, because what is actually being sent is the code for the receiving phone to then represent as the emoji picture.

 

Small excerpt from the chart of emoji UNICODE .

UNICODE dates back to 1987 when employees of Apple collaborated with a worker at Xerox with the aim to develop a universal, unified, and unique character encoding system.  According to Wikipedia, UNICODE now contains a repertoire of more than 128,000 characters, covering 135 modern and historic scripts.  For this reason, the world is able to not only view each others’ unique language characters, but also communicate with simple, effective, and fun emojis.