Hey guys it’s Greg with Apple Explained,and today we’re going to explore the history of the emoji.
This topic was the second place winner inlast week’s voting poll and if you didn’t get to vote, make sure you’re subscribed,that way the voting polls will show up right in your activity feed.
Now emoji date back to 1999 when they firstappeared on Japanese cell phones.
But it’s history goes further than that,because before there were emoji, there were emoticons.
Emoticons were the pictorial representationof a facial expression by using things like punctuation marks, numbers, and letters.
The earliest use of emoticons can be tracedall the way back to the 17th century when a Slovak notary used one to indicate his satisfactionwith the state of his town's financial records.
In 1862, The New York Times also allegedlyused an emoticon in this snippet of a speech transcript.
And some of the first emoticons representingvarious moods were publish in an 1881 issue of Puck magazine.
So it’s clear that using symbols to representfacial expressions isn’t a modern concept, but it did become more popular with the adventof the computer.
The first American Standard Code for InformationInterchange emoticons, or ASCII for short which is essentially just an encoding standard,were written by Scott Fahlman in 1982, he thought they’d help people on a messageboard at Carnegie Mellon to distinguish serious posts from jokes by using the smiley faceand frown face.
And the symbols caught on.
Now at about the same time, Japan was developingemoticons of their own, but they took a different approach.
Instead of writing emoticons sideways to thedirection of the text, users in Japan popularized a kind of emoticon called kaomoji.
Kao, meaning face, and moji, meaning character,that was written in the same orientation as the text.
As the internet became widespread in the late1990s, emoticons became increasingly popular and were commonly used in text messages, Internetforums and e-mails.
They became so popular, that artist ShigetakaKurita set out to create true visual symbols that could replace emoticon.
Kurita worked on the development team for“i-mode,” an early mobile internet platform from Japan’s main mobile carrier, DOCOMO.
Kurita wanted to design an attractive interfaceto convey information in a simple, clear way.
Like an icon to show the weather forecastrather than spelling out the word “cloudy.”
He took inspiration from Chinese characters,street signs, and symbols used in manga and sketched a set of 12x12-pixel images thatcould be selected from a keyboard-like grid within the i-mode interface, then sent onmobile phones and pagers as their own individual characters.
Kurita’s original 176 emoji—now part ofa permanent collection at New York’s Museum of Modern Art—favored symbols over faces,because DOCOMO’s goal was to find new ways to express information.
There were characters to show the weather(sun, clouds, umbrella, snowman), traffic (car, tram, airplane, ship), technology (landline,cell phone, TV, GameBoy), and all the phases of the moon.
It was the beginning of a new visual language.
Emoji were an instant success in Japan andrival companies like AU and SoftBank each created their own set of emoji less than ayear later.
The problem was each company’s emoji wereproprietary, so using them across carries could get a bit hairy.
As mobile computing continued to explode throughoutthe mid-2000s, companies outside Japan, like Apple, saw an opportunity to incorporate emojion their platforms.
In 2007, a software internationalization teamat Google decided to lead the effort, petitioning to get emoji recognized by the Unicode Consortium,a nonprofit group that works sort of like the United Nations to maintain text standardsacross computers.
Now you may be wondering what exactly theUnicode Consortium is responsible for.
Well, since software is built on code, everyletter or character you type on a computer is “encoded” or represented by a numericalcode.
Before Unicode, there were hundreds of differentencoding systems, which meant different computers and servers didn’t always represent textthe same way.
The purpose of Unicode was to standardizethese codes for international communication, so that the letters you typed in English,Chinese, or any other language, showed up accurately across platforms and across devices.
The Google team—Kat Momoi, Mark Davis, andMarkus Scherer—noticed emoji’s ascent in Japan and argued that emoji should fallunder the same standard.
In 2009, a pair of Apple engineers, YasuoKida and Peter Edberg, joined in and submitted an official proposal to adopt 625 new emojicharacters into the Unicode Standard.
Unicode accepted the proposal in 2010, a decisionthat would make emoji accessible everywhere.
Unicode ultimately decided to index emoji“because of their use as characters for text-messaging in a number of Japanese manufacturers’corporate standards.”
What that means is: Emoji had become too popularto ignore and unicode was going beyond just accepting a proposal to establish standardsfor emoji—it was the beginning of legitimizing emoji as a form of communication.
They were on their way to becoming a language.
AD BREAK In the mid-2000s, few companies outside ofJapan had created their own emoji keyboards, but users could still access them with thirdparty apps, which let users copy and paste the icons into text messages and emails.
But due to compatibility issues, the recipientmay have seen a question mark instead of the intended emoji.
In 2011, Apple added an official emoji keyboardto iOS, and Android followed suit two years later.
This allowed people to access emoji directlyfrom a keyboard on their phones, the same way you’d switch to a Korean or Japanesekeyboard to access those language-specific characters.
The keyboard also popularized emoji with anentirely new audience.
The New York Times suggested the move couldgive emoji a shot at “mainstream success,” noting that young people were already adjustingtheir texting habits to include the icons.
As emoji became more popular, they also becamemore plentiful.
The Unicode Consortium added new emoji toits approved list each year, gathered from users around the world: the first emoji bride,dozens of plants and animals, types of food, and depictions of all kinds of activities.
Unicode requires a lengthy submission andapproval process for every new batch hoping for admission, and it can take up to two yearsfor an emoji to travel from the artists sketchpad to your phone.
First, new emoji are suggested through a formalproposal to the Unicode Consortium.
But these proposals required an explanationof why the emoji should be adopted and ideas for how it might look. Considerations of the design is more complexthan you might think.
If there’s going to be an emoji to represent“beans,” should they be black beans? Refried beans? Lima beans? How about green beans? Should they be in a can? Or should they be in a bowl? Maybe they’re growing out of the ground? Once the user specifies every last detailand justifies the design, the proposal is examined by the Unicode Consortium’s emojisubcommittee, which meets twice a week to discuss and decide on all emoji-related matters.
When the subcommittee comes to a consensus,the new emoji is officially born.
As the list of emoji began to grow, some peoplewondered why certain things were favored over others.
Why were there six icons to represent sushi,but none for tacos, burritos, or enchiladas? There were a lot of occupational emoji likedoctors, chefs, and police, but why were they all men? And why were all the human emoji white people? By 2014, the emoji had become political.
It happened with emoji representing food,flags, families, and more.
For example, traditional African cuisine wasn’tincluded, the Israeli flag was featured, but not the Palestinian one, and there weren’tany families that represented single parents or same-sex couples.
It wasn’t just about having the right iconto describe what you ate for lunch, it was about having a digital representation of yourculture.
In 2015, Unicode took its first step towarddiversifying emoji by introducing the option to change the skin tone on emoji representingpeople, along with additions to include more types of people doing more types of things.
Since then, every update has included incrementalsteps toward diversifying the types of people and cultures represented in the emoji keyboard:female surfers and cyclists, women with hard hats and stethoscopes, and people wearingturbans and hijabs, just to name a few.
Unicode has also taken steps recently towardcreating gender-neutral emoji, and other symbols to represent the full spectrum of emoji users.
AD BREAK Now, emoji are prone to being misunderstoodjust like any other language.
And that’s mainly for two reasons.
First, is how the design is interpreted bythe reader. When the artist creates an emoji, they thinkabout its design in a certain way, but it may not evoke the same thoughts in others.
And some of this is cultural. For example, the Sleepy Face symbol couldeasily be misunderstood for a tear emoji by people in the west who aren’t familiar withanime and manga which uses snot bubbles to indicate a character is sleeping.
The second reason behind potential confusionis that each platform uses a slightly different design to represent an emoji.
So an emoji you send from an iPhone will appearslightly different on an android device, but in recent years efforts have been made toestablish consistent designs across platforms.
Some emoji have even caused arrests and imprisonmentsdue to their perceived meanings.
Apparently the gun 🔫, knife 🗡, and bomb💣 emoji were used in ways that were found to be credible threats by authorities.
And these sort of incidents prompted discussionamong legal experts on whether or not emoji could be used as evidence in court trials,an issue still being debated today.
In 2016, Apple announced that the gun emojiin iOS 10 would change from a realistic revolver to a water gun, and by 2018 most major platformsincluding Google, Microsoft, Samsung, Facebook, and Twitter had altered their pistol emojito match Apple's water gun design.
And along with the gun, Apple planned on updatingthe peach emoji in iOS 10 since it was being used more often as something other than apeach.
But the redesign was met with fierce backlashin beta testing and Apple reversed their decision by the time iOS 10 was available to the public.
Now The Unicode Consortium considers new emojievery year, which means the vocabulary of emoji continues to evolve with every updateto iOS and Android.
Recent additions, which appeared in 2017,included mythical creatures (mermaids, genies, elves, and vampires), food (pie, sandwich,broccoli, takeout), animals (dinosaur, hedgehog, giraffe, zebra), and faces (starstruck, mindblown,shhhing, and expletive-spouting angry face).
The update also added new ways to representhumans: There’s a woman cradling a baby, a woman wearing a hijab, and three new gender-neutraloptions to represent people of all ages.
A set of emoji proposals approved earlierthis year also added the options to give emoji gray or red hair, as well as new culturalsymbols like a mooncake and a nay-zar amulet.
And because of consistent technological progress,emoji are becoming even more capable and customizable.
Like with Apple’s Animoji, which uses theiPhone X’s Face Tracking technology to animate an emoji using a person’s facial expressions.
For now, the feature only works with selectemoji, but one day it could potentially include every emoji with a face.
The next batch of emoji will depend on whatpeople design and submit to The Unicode Consortium.
It’s something anyone can do, and like Isaid before, they require a prototype of the emoji, an explanation of how and why peoplewould use it, and what its addition would mean for the greater emoji language.
If you’d like to propose an emoji of yourown, you can read more about the requirements and submission process on Unicode’s website.
But what kind of emoji do you want to seein the next Unicode update? I’d personally enjoy a yawning face andmaybe more animals, but let me know what you think in the comments.
And if you want to vote for the next videotopic, don’t forget to subscribe.
Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you nexttime.
This topic was the second place winner inlast week’s voting poll and if you didn’t get to vote, make sure you’re subscribed,that way the voting polls will show up right in your activity feed.
Now emoji date back to 1999 when they firstappeared on Japanese cell phones.
But it’s history goes further than that,because before there were emoji, there were emoticons.
Emoticons were the pictorial representationof a facial expression by using things like punctuation marks, numbers, and letters.
The earliest use of emoticons can be tracedall the way back to the 17th century when a Slovak notary used one to indicate his satisfactionwith the state of his town's financial records.
In 1862, The New York Times also allegedlyused an emoticon in this snippet of a speech transcript.
And some of the first emoticons representingvarious moods were publish in an 1881 issue of Puck magazine.
So it’s clear that using symbols to representfacial expressions isn’t a modern concept, but it did become more popular with the adventof the computer.
The first American Standard Code for InformationInterchange emoticons, or ASCII for short which is essentially just an encoding standard,were written by Scott Fahlman in 1982, he thought they’d help people on a messageboard at Carnegie Mellon to distinguish serious posts from jokes by using the smiley faceand frown face.
And the symbols caught on.
Now at about the same time, Japan was developingemoticons of their own, but they took a different approach.
Instead of writing emoticons sideways to thedirection of the text, users in Japan popularized a kind of emoticon called kaomoji.
Kao, meaning face, and moji, meaning character,that was written in the same orientation as the text.
As the internet became widespread in the late1990s, emoticons became increasingly popular and were commonly used in text messages, Internetforums and e-mails.
They became so popular, that artist ShigetakaKurita set out to create true visual symbols that could replace emoticon.
Kurita worked on the development team for“i-mode,” an early mobile internet platform from Japan’s main mobile carrier, DOCOMO.
Kurita wanted to design an attractive interfaceto convey information in a simple, clear way.
Like an icon to show the weather forecastrather than spelling out the word “cloudy.”
He took inspiration from Chinese characters,street signs, and symbols used in manga and sketched a set of 12x12-pixel images thatcould be selected from a keyboard-like grid within the i-mode interface, then sent onmobile phones and pagers as their own individual characters.
Kurita’s original 176 emoji—now part ofa permanent collection at New York’s Museum of Modern Art—favored symbols over faces,because DOCOMO’s goal was to find new ways to express information.
There were characters to show the weather(sun, clouds, umbrella, snowman), traffic (car, tram, airplane, ship), technology (landline,cell phone, TV, GameBoy), and all the phases of the moon.
It was the beginning of a new visual language.
Emoji were an instant success in Japan andrival companies like AU and SoftBank each created their own set of emoji less than ayear later.
The problem was each company’s emoji wereproprietary, so using them across carries could get a bit hairy.
As mobile computing continued to explode throughoutthe mid-2000s, companies outside Japan, like Apple, saw an opportunity to incorporate emojion their platforms.
In 2007, a software internationalization teamat Google decided to lead the effort, petitioning to get emoji recognized by the Unicode Consortium,a nonprofit group that works sort of like the United Nations to maintain text standardsacross computers.
Now you may be wondering what exactly theUnicode Consortium is responsible for.
Well, since software is built on code, everyletter or character you type on a computer is “encoded” or represented by a numericalcode.
Before Unicode, there were hundreds of differentencoding systems, which meant different computers and servers didn’t always represent textthe same way.
The purpose of Unicode was to standardizethese codes for international communication, so that the letters you typed in English,Chinese, or any other language, showed up accurately across platforms and across devices.
The Google team—Kat Momoi, Mark Davis, andMarkus Scherer—noticed emoji’s ascent in Japan and argued that emoji should fallunder the same standard.
In 2009, a pair of Apple engineers, YasuoKida and Peter Edberg, joined in and submitted an official proposal to adopt 625 new emojicharacters into the Unicode Standard.
Unicode accepted the proposal in 2010, a decisionthat would make emoji accessible everywhere.
Unicode ultimately decided to index emoji“because of their use as characters for text-messaging in a number of Japanese manufacturers’corporate standards.”
What that means is: Emoji had become too popularto ignore and unicode was going beyond just accepting a proposal to establish standardsfor emoji—it was the beginning of legitimizing emoji as a form of communication.
They were on their way to becoming a language.
AD BREAK In the mid-2000s, few companies outside ofJapan had created their own emoji keyboards, but users could still access them with thirdparty apps, which let users copy and paste the icons into text messages and emails.
But due to compatibility issues, the recipientmay have seen a question mark instead of the intended emoji.
In 2011, Apple added an official emoji keyboardto iOS, and Android followed suit two years later.
This allowed people to access emoji directlyfrom a keyboard on their phones, the same way you’d switch to a Korean or Japanesekeyboard to access those language-specific characters.
The keyboard also popularized emoji with anentirely new audience.
The New York Times suggested the move couldgive emoji a shot at “mainstream success,” noting that young people were already adjustingtheir texting habits to include the icons.
As emoji became more popular, they also becamemore plentiful.
The Unicode Consortium added new emoji toits approved list each year, gathered from users around the world: the first emoji bride,dozens of plants and animals, types of food, and depictions of all kinds of activities.
Unicode requires a lengthy submission andapproval process for every new batch hoping for admission, and it can take up to two yearsfor an emoji to travel from the artists sketchpad to your phone.
First, new emoji are suggested through a formalproposal to the Unicode Consortium.
But these proposals required an explanationof why the emoji should be adopted and ideas for how it might look. Considerations of the design is more complexthan you might think.
If there’s going to be an emoji to represent“beans,” should they be black beans? Refried beans? Lima beans? How about green beans? Should they be in a can? Or should they be in a bowl? Maybe they’re growing out of the ground? Once the user specifies every last detailand justifies the design, the proposal is examined by the Unicode Consortium’s emojisubcommittee, which meets twice a week to discuss and decide on all emoji-related matters.
When the subcommittee comes to a consensus,the new emoji is officially born.
As the list of emoji began to grow, some peoplewondered why certain things were favored over others.
Why were there six icons to represent sushi,but none for tacos, burritos, or enchiladas? There were a lot of occupational emoji likedoctors, chefs, and police, but why were they all men? And why were all the human emoji white people? By 2014, the emoji had become political.
It happened with emoji representing food,flags, families, and more.
For example, traditional African cuisine wasn’tincluded, the Israeli flag was featured, but not the Palestinian one, and there weren’tany families that represented single parents or same-sex couples.
It wasn’t just about having the right iconto describe what you ate for lunch, it was about having a digital representation of yourculture.
In 2015, Unicode took its first step towarddiversifying emoji by introducing the option to change the skin tone on emoji representingpeople, along with additions to include more types of people doing more types of things.
Since then, every update has included incrementalsteps toward diversifying the types of people and cultures represented in the emoji keyboard:female surfers and cyclists, women with hard hats and stethoscopes, and people wearingturbans and hijabs, just to name a few.
Unicode has also taken steps recently towardcreating gender-neutral emoji, and other symbols to represent the full spectrum of emoji users.
AD BREAK Now, emoji are prone to being misunderstoodjust like any other language.
And that’s mainly for two reasons.
First, is how the design is interpreted bythe reader. When the artist creates an emoji, they thinkabout its design in a certain way, but it may not evoke the same thoughts in others.
And some of this is cultural. For example, the Sleepy Face symbol couldeasily be misunderstood for a tear emoji by people in the west who aren’t familiar withanime and manga which uses snot bubbles to indicate a character is sleeping.
The second reason behind potential confusionis that each platform uses a slightly different design to represent an emoji.
So an emoji you send from an iPhone will appearslightly different on an android device, but in recent years efforts have been made toestablish consistent designs across platforms.
Some emoji have even caused arrests and imprisonmentsdue to their perceived meanings.
Apparently the gun 🔫, knife 🗡, and bomb💣 emoji were used in ways that were found to be credible threats by authorities.
And these sort of incidents prompted discussionamong legal experts on whether or not emoji could be used as evidence in court trials,an issue still being debated today.
In 2016, Apple announced that the gun emojiin iOS 10 would change from a realistic revolver to a water gun, and by 2018 most major platformsincluding Google, Microsoft, Samsung, Facebook, and Twitter had altered their pistol emojito match Apple's water gun design.
And along with the gun, Apple planned on updatingthe peach emoji in iOS 10 since it was being used more often as something other than apeach.
But the redesign was met with fierce backlashin beta testing and Apple reversed their decision by the time iOS 10 was available to the public.
Now The Unicode Consortium considers new emojievery year, which means the vocabulary of emoji continues to evolve with every updateto iOS and Android.
Recent additions, which appeared in 2017,included mythical creatures (mermaids, genies, elves, and vampires), food (pie, sandwich,broccoli, takeout), animals (dinosaur, hedgehog, giraffe, zebra), and faces (starstruck, mindblown,shhhing, and expletive-spouting angry face).
The update also added new ways to representhumans: There’s a woman cradling a baby, a woman wearing a hijab, and three new gender-neutraloptions to represent people of all ages.
A set of emoji proposals approved earlierthis year also added the options to give emoji gray or red hair, as well as new culturalsymbols like a mooncake and a nay-zar amulet.
And because of consistent technological progress,emoji are becoming even more capable and customizable.
Like with Apple’s Animoji, which uses theiPhone X’s Face Tracking technology to animate an emoji using a person’s facial expressions.
For now, the feature only works with selectemoji, but one day it could potentially include every emoji with a face.
The next batch of emoji will depend on whatpeople design and submit to The Unicode Consortium.
It’s something anyone can do, and like Isaid before, they require a prototype of the emoji, an explanation of how and why peoplewould use it, and what its addition would mean for the greater emoji language.
If you’d like to propose an emoji of yourown, you can read more about the requirements and submission process on Unicode’s website.
But what kind of emoji do you want to seein the next Unicode update? I’d personally enjoy a yawning face andmaybe more animals, but let me know what you think in the comments.
And if you want to vote for the next videotopic, don’t forget to subscribe.
Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you nexttime.
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