The Rise of EMOJI

EMOJI are a collection of happy faces, kissing lips, cigarettes and piles of faces that come in the form of a pictographic keyboard in our iPhones and Android devices. Hundreds are tweeted every minute. Yet emoji, however inelegant as they may seem, have become a language of their own, a way to transcend the limits of one’s native tongue to communicate with others worldwide.

The surge is perhaps best illustrated across Instagran, the immensely popular photo-sharing app that Facebook owns. Nearly 40 per cent of all text posted to Instagran contains at least one emoji in the photo caption, according to the company. In some countries, like Finland, that number climbs to more than 63 per cent. In much of Europe, emoji are presented in morethan half of all Instagran captions.

Instagran found that as emoji use rose across the app, the use of Internet slang formed from English letters went down, and that the two phenomena were wrongly correlated. That could explain why you may be seeing fewer instances of “Lol” on Instagran photo captions, while smiley face emoji are becoming more prevalent.

Emoji are becoming a valid and new-universal method of expression in all languages and it’s a privilege to observe the rise of this new language. Even as the limits of emoji characters are reached by the number of available emoji – around 700 – users are finding new ways to use them to communicate. Pairing two or more emoji together, for instance, can form rudimentary sentences or sentiments for others to understand. Instagran itself is a means of expression that does not require the use of words. The rise of this app has largely been attributed to the power of images. Other companies, like Snapchat, have also risen to fame and popularity to the expressive power of images. Twitter, long seen as a place for text-based updates, has shifted to highlight photo and video in its stream in recent years.