The Evolution of Emoji: From Simple Symbols to Cultural Icons
A few years ago, I often found myself driving past a roadside ice cream stand under construction. For weeks, the roof of this stand—a giant white swirl of fiberglass soft serve—sat on the ground next to the structure, waiting to be lowered onto the finished cone-shaped building with a crane. While I knew what it was supposed to represent, every time I glimpsed it, my first thought was, “There’s a giant poop emoji.” This simple observation highlights how deeply emoji have embedded themselves in our daily lives and even our subconscious.
In his book Face With Tears of Joy, Keith Houston explores the history of emoji and argues that they have become so prevalent in our communication that they should be considered alongside grammar or punctuation. While I’m not entirely convinced about their equivalence to grammar, which seems as fundamental to language as words themselves, I agree that punctuation has played a crucial role in shaping how we express ourselves. Houston’s engaging blend of pop culture and tech history delves into the question of what emojis truly are—symbols, words, pictographs, a script, or even a language? His argument that these tiny images have become an inseparable part of our culture, and perhaps even our unconscious minds, feels convincing, especially when considering that iconic poop emoji by the highway.
Houston traces the origins of emoji back to ancient forms of written language, starting with ideograms—pictures of actual objects. Cuneiform, hieroglyphics, and Chinese characters all began this way. He suggests that it is tempting to imagine that emoji might one day evolve into a true script, similar to how these early systems developed. However, projects like a 2009 “translation” of Moby-Dick into emojis only served to show how unlikely that is. Emoji don’t have any meaningful connection to spoken language, and the languages its users speak already have their own written forms. Emoji are fundamentally a phenomenon of text-based communication.
The story of emoji begins in Japan, where even primitive devices like pagers supported small pixelated images that users found delightful. Houston uses the term “emoji” both for a single glyph and the entire lexicon of images, honoring their Japanese roots. There is some debate over who created the first emoji, but many credit Shigetaka Kurita, an engineer who designed a font of symbols for cellphones in the late 1990s. According to Houston, Kurita added symbols for hands making “rock,” “paper,” and “scissors” gestures because he thought they might be useful in mobile games. He also included an SUV emoji, as he drove one when snowboarding.
Emoji gained popularity in the West during the 2010s, thanks to Apple’s colorful and detailed versions available on the iPhone. Google had previously introduced some pictographs called “goomoji” in Gmail during the 2000s and initiated efforts to standardize emoji through the Unicode Consortium. However, it wasn’t until high-resolution texting became widespread that emoji truly took off outside Japan.
Houston’s book takes readers on a nostalgic journey through the early days of emoji, including the Zapf Dingbats font on early Macintosh computers and the rise of emoticons. One of the earliest emoticons was proposed in 1982 by computer scientist Scott E. Fahlman on the electronic bulletin board of Carnegie Mellon University. He suggested using a colon, dash, and closing parenthesis to mark jokes, a concept that still resonates today.
Emoticons addressed a critical issue in early online communication: the lack of nonverbal cues like tone of voice, facial expressions, and hand gestures. Without these, online interactions often led to misunderstandings. Emoticons helped bridge that gap, allowing people to convey emotions more clearly.
Faces remain among the most commonly used emoji, supporting a 2019 paper by linguists Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne, which suggests that emoji act as the body language of the web. Other popular emoji, such as hearts, folded hands, and side-eyes, serve as substitutes for gestures or expressions that are hard to convey in text alone. This is the core utility of emoji, offering a visual shorthand for complex emotions.
The 2010s marked a turning point for emoji, with their explosion in popularity. Houston captures the fun and excitement of this era, from debates over skin tones and hair colors to silly controversies over the placement of cheese in a cheeseburger glyph. These disputes were lighthearted compared to today’s internet culture, where emoji usage often carries deeper meanings.
Emoji also found their way into unexpected places, from political statements to dating sites. An Australian foreign minister once responded to an interview using only emoji, and President Barack Obama thanked Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe for his country’s contributions to international culture—including emoji. BuzzFeed even created an election night tracker that allowed users to respond with emoji.
Despite their widespread use, emoji still provide moments of joy. A friend and I recently concluded a text exchange with 🌳 and 🌞, reminding us that even in difficult times, we can find solace in nature. However, the need for emoji may be waning as social media shifts toward video content, where nonverbal cues are more easily conveyed.
For now, I still see that giant poop emoji by the highway, and I doubt I’ll ever think of it as just an ice cream stand. But maybe, one day, people will drive past it and only see creamy frozen desserts. Until then, emoji will continue to shape how we communicate, one little image at a time.