Emoticon vs Emoji

 

Why do we need Emoticons or Emojis?

In the present times, communication has shifted online due to the increased technology-led lifestyle but also as a result of Covid-19 and the need for social distancing. When text-based messaging has become rampant, be it to converse with friends and family living far away or for business dealings between suppliers and buyers, it is mandatory to engage in clear, unambiguous communication. 

While face-to-face correspondence is not always feasible due to busy schedules, transportation difficulties or large geographical distances, emojis, and emoticons are the perfect expressions of one’s feelings through messages. The convenience that these emojis provide helps create a polite and courteous tone. They deliver the specific mood of the sender of the text. For instance, while chatting with a friend you made on social media whose texting style is somewhat unfamiliar to you, the use of emojis can assist you in deciphering what the other person is intending to convey in his messages. Hence, to this new internet style, there is the addition of two new-age hieroglyphic languages: emoticons and emoji.

What are Emoticons?

The older of the two is an emoticon. These are punctuations, signs, numbers and letters on our keyboard to create pictorial icons to portray any emotion or sentiment. Due to the limitation of our keyboards, most emoticons are read sideways. 

Examples of Emoticons: Smile with a wink, big grin, sad, wow face, grim, sticking out your tongue

Historical Invention of the Emoticon

The emoticon came into being in 1982 after a joke inadvertently went wrong in Carnegie Mellon University. Neil Schwartz posted a physics riddle about mercury and a candle on the Carnegie Mellon University message board. To that, his colleague Howard Gayle replied: “WARNING! Because of a recent physics experiment, the leftmost elevator has been contaminated with mercury. There is also some slight fire damage. Decontamination should be complete by 08:00 Friday." 

What’s next is that the whole campus was in a frenzy. In this state of confusion Dr. Scott E. Fahlman, a computer scientist at CMU, suggested that the serious and non-serious posts should be marked to eliminate any further misunderstandings. This was ensured through the two sets of characters we now recognize as standard emoticons: the smiley face :-) for the light-hearted posts and the frowning face :-( for the more serious ones. After this, the use of emotions spread rapidly throughout CMU and even to other universities and research labs. 

What are Emojis?

These are more recent additions to the texting world of social media and are derived from the Japanese e, “picture,” and moji, “character.” Emojis are pictographs of faces, objects, and symbols and are a method of communication through pictures and drawings. Apple offers various types of emojis. These range from the yellow faces with countless expressions on them, icons of buildings, animals, flowers, food items, or even mathematical symbols.

Historical Invention of the Emoji

The first emoji was created in 1999 by Shigetaka Kurita, a Japanese artist mainly for the Japanese user base.  The first emoji was very simple—only 12 pixels by 12 pixels—and were inspired by manga art kanji characters. The emojis were for Japan’s main mobile carrier, DOCOMO. Kurita created a 176 character emoji set in 1999 for DOCOMO’s mobile platform “i-mode.” He wanted to keep the designs as unsophisticated as possible to convey the precise message. This allowed people the opportunity to insert emotion into digital conversations and gave way to a new visual language. 

The Spread of Emojis

The emojis became popular in the U.S when Apple added an official emoji keyboard to iOS in 2011, and Android followed in their footsteps several years later.  Today, they are so iconic that the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) acquired Kurita’s original Emoji set. Now emojis are available in all messaging apps and although each app has a different emoji style, the emojis can be translated across different platforms via Unicode. 

What is The Unicode Consortium?

The Unicode Consortium, a non-profit that maintains text standards across computers globally, adds hundreds of new emojis to their approved list. Unicode Consortium has an actual emoji subcommittee that congregates twice weekly to come to a consensus on all emoji-related matters. Instant messaging apps and browsers read the code through the international character-encoding system of Unicode and display the graphic that corresponds with it. Different software show different graphics which is why as an Apple user if you send an emoji to an Android recipient, he may not see the same graphic as yours. 

Emojis and Emoticons are interchangeable

Some emojis and emoticons can be used interchangeably and may somehow incur confusion. Most of the round yellow faces on your smartphone have corresponding sets of characters. 

:$ matches the Flushed Face emoji. 

',:-| stands for the Face with One Eyebrow Raised. 

A few other, non-face emojis have typography twins, too. 

There's </3 for Broken Heart

@}->-- and a few others for Rose