How would you explain to a Victorian-era time traveller that in 2025 our systems of communication have become so advanced that we can both read the works of Shakespeare on a gizmo the size of a cigarette pack — and express our thoughts with a pile of poo?
While smartphones link us to the corpus of world knowledge, emojis allow a portal to the corpus of crap, all in the name of instant messaging. Around 10 billion emojis are sent everyday, from a storehouse of 3,600-plus pictorial images ranging from the vulgar (see above) to the pornographic (eggplants).
Born from the words for “pictures” and “written characters,” the emoji is a natural extension of the visual symbolism that suffuses Japanese culture and public life, notes Keith Houston in his book, Face With Tears of Joy. Wired calls them the first language born of the digital world.
They are predated by the emoticon, a form of digital expression using keyboard punctuation symbols such as parentheses to suggest facial expressions and first credited to American professor Scott Fahlman in 1982.
In 1999, graphic artist Shigetaka Kurita — inspired by manga, Chinese characters and even international signs for bathrooms — created what is considered the most celebrated set of emojis, 176 rudimentary images for a Japanese cellphone company representing simple yet universal concepts such as food and weather.
The emoticon and emoji both derive inspiration from the inescapable ‘smiley face’ of the 1960s and 1970s, and pictographs (a type of emoji) were the basis of Egyptian hieroglyphics.
Yet the emoji could have remained largely a Far Eastern phenomenon if not for tech giant Apple’s decision in the 2000s to incorporate them on platforms beyond mobile phones. By 2010 they were “too popular to ignore,” says Wired, and that year the non-profit Unicode consortium was established to standardize and regulate them.
A total of 994 characters were released in that first batch, including the notorious “pile of poo,” which — along with the X-rated peach and eggplant pictograms — has stirred the most unease and debate. Indeed, the media declared 2017 the year of the Great Poop Emoji Feud as Unicode mulled more expressive variations of the popular image. For contributing typographer Michael Everson it was a busted flush. “Organic waste isn’t cute,” he declared.
Also not cute: Emoji 4 Porn, a short-lived feature on Pornhub that sexualized innocent fruits and vegetables; monkey symbols used as racist imagery; drug dealers using emojis to flog their wares; gun threats at schools; and smiley faces at work deemed suggestive of incompetence rather than warmth.
It’s not all frivolity and darkness. Emojis have been used to cut across language and cultural barriers; for instance, in spreading the message about insect-borne diseases. In 2015 Oxford Dictionaries named the “Face with Tears of Joy” emoji its word of the year, and in 2016 New York’s Museum of Modern Art acquired Kurita’s original emoji symbols, describing them as “powerful manifestations of the capacity of design to alter human behaviour.”
Others refuse to be swayed, considering them a debasement of communications. Fahlman, the prof behind the emoticon, says emojis are ugly and “ruin the challenge of trying to come up with a clever way to express oneself using standard keyboard characters,” while author Houston says they become “a kind of straitjacket for language, smoothing out what we want to say by restricting what we can say.”
One thing is clear: they’re not going away. Unicode continues to assess new emojis, and anyone can submit a proposal. Yet there are signs we have reached peak emoji; Forbes notes that emoji makers are “seemingly running out of ideas.” Consider, too, that of the top five emojis, 80 per cent involve tears of some sort, techtarget.com reports.
If nothing else, emojis have largely killed off netspeak. No more OMGs and LOLs. Whether that’s worth a world of scowling poop is another matter entirely.
