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Scott Fahlman, a young professor at Carnegie Mellon University created the smiley face :-) and unhappy face :-(, first sending them in a message at 11.44pm on September 19, 1982.⁴⁰

One hundred and seventy-six emojis designed by Shigetaka Kurita were made available on mobile phones by the Japanese telephone company NTT in 1999. For this history-making contribution to human practices of visualization, in 2016 they were acquired for the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In its announcement, the museum called them “humble masterpieces of design [that] planted the seeds for the explosive growth of a new visual language.”⁴¹

Emojis were added to Microsoft Windows in 2008, the Apple OS in 2011, Google Android in 2013. Facebook launched its “Like” emoji on 9 February 2009,⁴² and added other so-called “reactions” in 2016.⁴³

Different tech companies each render emojis in their own ways, but through Unicode share their underlying meanings. The importance of likeness in so many emojis became the focal point of a crisis at Google in 2017, when it was discovered that its hamburger emoji had cheese underneath the meat patty, instead of on top. This was a failure of similitude that had to be rectified urgently.⁴⁴

Text today – defined by this grammar as that which is represented in Unicode – includes materializations of meaning that cross icon (such as emojis and dentistry symbols), directedness (such as arrows, warning signs), and abstractions (including the letters of phonic alphabets that only conventionally and arbitrarily mean the sounds they reference). Some emojis are directed signs or abstract symbols, but most are likenesses. Today, people use likeness emojis more and more. As we begin to type a word on a phone, suggestive text prompts us to use an emoji instead.

Moving beyond the constraints of abstract and arbitrary phonemes and graphemes, in the era of total globalization, emojis of likeness have burgeoned to become a universal, translingual semantics. Here is another place where text is diverging still further from speech, using more likenesses and fewer abstractions. Though of course, even if more universal for their divergence from speech, they are not without cross-cultural weirdnesses⁴⁵ and divergent interpretations.⁴⁶

Emojis expressed in Unicode have become useful to marketeers wanting to know how people feel in the global marketplace. The universal semantics standardized in Unicode helps them to do this – in aggregate, not to mention the finely grained knowing of us all individually.

Brandwatch Analytics styles itself “the world’s leading social listening platform.” For its 2017 report, Brandwatch analyzed six billion emojis generated in Twitter over a two-year period. “This report from Brandwatch … quite possibly … gives us the richest look at social media and brand sentiment to date,” gushed Dennis Wakabayashi, VP, Digital Marketing and Commerce Integration @The Integer Group. Brandwatch’s “technologies help us … understand how mindset and emotional state affects brands. This means richer insights, smarter engagement, and more relevance. You might even think of it as the dawning of Internet Emotional Intelligence.”⁴⁷

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³⁵ https://emojipedia.org/unicode-1.1/

³⁶ https://unicode.org/emoji/charts/full-emoji-list.html

³⁷ Richard Kern, 2015, Language, Literacy, and Technology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 261–67.

³⁸ Brian Dear, 2017, The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the Plato System and the Dawn of Cyberculture, New York: Pantheon Books, pp. 338–42.

³⁹ Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, 2017, “Conceptualizing E-Learning,” pp. 1–45 in E-Learning Ecologies, edited by B. Cope and M. Kalantzis, New York: Routledge.

⁴⁰ www.cs.cmu.edu/~sef/sefSmiley.htm

⁴¹ https://news.artnet.com/exhibitions/emoji-museum-of-modern-art-collection-722330

⁴² www.facebook.com/notes/facebook/i-like-this/53024537130

⁴³ www.wired.com/2016/02/facebook-reactions-totally-redesigned-like-button/

⁴⁴ https://blog.emojipedia.org/google-fixes-burger-emoji/

⁴⁵ https://hackernoon.com/samsungs-bizarre-emojis-6be568a3b7d9

⁴⁶ Jaram Park, Vladimir Barash, Clay Fink, and Meeyoung Cha, 2013, “Emoticon Style: Interpreting Differences in Emoticons across Cultures,” paper presented at the Proceedings of the Seventh International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media.

⁴⁷ www.brandwatch.com/reports/the-emoji-report/view/

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Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2020. Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 33–35. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

Emojis §AS1.1.1a