Emojis or emoticons, also wrongly called "smileys", have become a real failure of web language. They have survived the changes in media and platforms. Already used on MSN or AIM Messenger 15 years ago, they are still present on Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat or Asian platforms such as Line, Weibo or WeChat. To learn more about this essential element of our daily communications, here is a reminder of the history of emojis, as well as a synthesis of the various studies on their use, according to countries and platforms.
Emoticon, emoji and Kaomoji
There is often confusion between emoticons and emojis, yet the two languages are different, and do not have the same history.
Emoticons: they are a facial representation made from typographic characters. The best known are of course the 🙂 or ;-). It is commonly accepted that they were invented in 1982 by computer scientist Scott Fahlamn at Carnegie Mellon University. Emoticons made it possible to differentiate between serious and lighter content. They are a contraction of "emotion icon".
Emojis: invented later, emojis were born in 1999 thanks to the Japanese company NTT DoCoMo. The telephone operator was facing a problem that now seems remote, its subscribers were using more and more photo messages. These image uploads consumed a lot of data. To overcome this, DoCoMo has invented the emoji which makes it possible to transform an emoticon into an image and therefore to consume fewer data and fewer characters per message. Since 2010, emojis have been part of the Unicode Standard language, and have undergone rapid development, thanks in particular to Apple, which integrated this Unicode emoji keyboard in 2011 into its devices. There are 972 Emoji characters available in Unicode 7.0 language. An update to Unicode 8.0 should be done this year and allow the use of emojis of different ethnic types.
Kaomoji: originally used in Japan, Kaomojis are the Japanese version of emoticons and they use the specificities of Japanese characters and punctuation. If Western emoticons mainly emphasize the expressions of the mouth, Kaomojis are more inclined to look at the eyes. It should also be noted that they have the advantage of being read horizontally, unlike emoticons. Here are some Kaomoji who express joy (◕‿◕) (o˘◡˘o), love (─‿‿─)♡ ( ˘⌣˘)♡ (˘⌣˘) ( ' ▽ `).｡ｏ♡, anger (＃`◢') (｀皿'＃) ┌∩´ (◣_◢)┌∩┐ou fear {{{ >_<) } } ´
Use of emojis : In messaging applications
The use of emojis has become considerably more democratic, whether by Internet users or brands. There are reportedly 6 billion emoticons or stickers sent every day via messaging applications. It should be noted that it is almost impossible to have reliable figures on these uses, but it is possible to have interesting data depending on the applications.
On Instagram:
Instagram recently shared its data on the use of emojis on the service. And the results are rather edifying. Almost half of the posts contain emojis in March 2015. Finns are the ones who use them the most, with 60% of texts containing emojis. In France, 50% of posts contain it, compared to only 10% in Tanzania.
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