It can be said that emojis have exploded in popularity and are slowly becoming a bit of a cornerstone for 21st-century communications. In fact, they’re everywhere, emojis can be seen on almost all social media platforms and instant messaging applications. It has become a gesture and representation of actions. Rather than typing bravo, you can simply use a clapping emoji to easily display that you are clapping your hands in awe of how you appreciate what you have witnessed. Emojis have become such a renowned method of communication that sometimes you can’t help but wonder “How did emojis get so freaking popular?”
Understanding Emojis
Well to understand the emoji’s road to popularity, we first need to know how emojis began. Emojis were created by a Japanese artist named Shigetaka Kurita in 1999. Kurita was working for a certain Japanese phone company called NTT Docomo and he wanted to create a simple and concise interface that could relay data to others in a new and innovative way. The result of his efforts was the emoji. Emojis are essentially tiny graphic images that are able to accurately represent an array of human emotions.
Why Emojis are so Popular
This is one of the reasons on why emojis have become so popular and have become so widely used. Emojis are such an excellent way to add personality to a bland text-based conversation, because sometimes there are situations wherein a text message may be falsely interpreted because it was taken out of context. An example of which would be when someone texted you a joke and you replied to them, saying “HaHa, nice joke bro”. If you replied to someone that way, without the use of an appropriate emoji like the “laughing face emoji”, it might seem as though you didn’t really find the other person’s joke funny and that you just replied to them with a “HaHa” out of pity.
That is why emojis are important because emojis are capable of adding meaning in ways that words cannot. The usage of emoticons has also been suggested to be able to help boost a person’s ability to communicate well. Emojis possess the ability to digitally provide us with the same levels of satisfaction in our interactions as we would have in person because our minds are said to process emojis similarly to written words. Emojis also look super cool, and in addition to looking cool and aesthetically pleasing, there is also some psychological evidence towards emojis which suggests that emojis are a better and are often a more simpler way of conveying emotion properly instead of standalone text in digital communications.
Takeaway
With all of these pieces of information in mind. You can clearly see how emojis have changed the digital messaging world and how emojis have become one of the most preferred methods of communication. Heck, some millennials don’t even bother to use words when sending someone a message, all they do is send a couple of appropriate emojis and done. With how things are now, you can safely say that emojis have dominated the world of digital messaging.
