The History of The Emoticons and Emojis

 Emojis or  Emoticons are a digital image, mostly used in text, to describe ones emotions, idea or statement. They have widely been coined as the millennial language  as they first appeared in phones in the 90's. However before you knew emojis as "😂" they were emoticons and presented as " ;)" or " :)" or even ":(" .  

History of Emoticons 

Emoticons can be traced back to the 1800's from type writers and the first winky face emoticon can be found in a transcript of an Abraham Lincoln speech written by the NewYork Times. The term emoticon is derived from emotion and icon. It refers to a  digital representation of a facial expression using characters. Emoticons were often used in online communication to convey emotion or tone. People began experimenting with different combinations of characters to create a wide range of facial expressions, emotions, and even objects. The creative use of punctuation marks, letters, and numbers allowed for a level of expressiveness in text based communication that was previously difficult to achieve.However the first documented emoticon was used by Scott Falhmn who was a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University. On September 19th, 1982 the first ":-)" was used. He proposed these for students to distinguish which post were jokes or not. These combinations of punctuation marks laid the groundwork for the emojis we use today.

History Of Emojis 

 The emojis we love and know now such as "😂" first popped up on mobile phones in Japan around 1997. The word emoji stems of the "moji" which means character in Japanese and "e" which means picture. In 1998, an engineer at the Japanese telecommunications company NTT DoCoMo, created the first set of 176 emojis for their mobile internet platform. These early emojis were dull and boring compared to todays colorful and detailed designs we see today, however they laid the foundation for what was to come. With the rise of instant messaging platforms as well as social media in the late 1990s and 2000s the use of emojis became even more popular, as users found new ways to express themselves online.With the advancement of smartphones, emojis went through another transformation, evolving into the emoji we know today.  In 2010, a non-profit organization that oversees the development of international standards for computer text and characters called Unicode Consortium, began incorporating emoji into its Unicode Standard. In 2011 is when Apple officially added an emojis keyboard to the IOS and have added many new emojis with every update.

The Impact of Emojis

One of the greatest impacts of emojis is their ability to enhance the emotional depth of online communication between individuals . In such a digital age where face-to-face interaction is often forgotten, emojis fill the gap by providing a great way to convey tone, mood, and sentiment.

Today, emojis have also become a huge part of online communication between the world.Emojis are the one form of language that doesn't have a barrier between cultures. From smiley faces and laughing faces to gestures such as hand-waving or thumbs up or more specialized emojis that represent food, animals or weather, emojis can provide people with a universal and engaging way to convey emotions, information and enhance their online interactions.