Celebrating World Emoji Day

These days, it seems like there’s a day to commemorate anything and everything, including emojis. J According to Wikipedia, World Emoji Day was the brainchild of Jeremy Burge.

The New York Times reported that Burge marked the day on 17^th July 2014 “based on the way the calendar emoji is shown on iPhones.”  The day is not official though but has been gaining in popularity as some organizations use it to release new emojis.

To really understand the history of the emoji, we’ll have to dust up the history books.

Emojis date back to 1997 and were first created and used on Japanese phones. They later became increasingly popular in the 2010s after being added to several mobile operating platforms. They are now considered to be a large part of pop culture.

Today, we use them to convey emotions that cannot be expressed by words alone. They exist in various forms including facial expressions, objects, places, types of weather and even animals. In 2015, so popular was the face with tears emoji  that it was crowned word of the year.

Some have been misunderstood and misinterpreted. In some cases, the emoji that is sent is not always shown the same way on the receiving end. Another issue relates to contextual interpretation, when someone sends an emoji, the intended emotion or feeling may not be conveyed to the receiver.

Another problem relates to technology. When you send an emoji, it may encode differently especially if the receiver does not use the same operating system as the sender.

But barring these small technical hitches, emojis do help us communicate more effectively and convey feelings that words alone cannot express.

Which leads us to a little test, if you cooked your favourite meal with Rina, Rinsun or baked a cake with Prestige, how how would you describe that meal with an emoji?

Let us know in the comment section.