Emoji, word or image?

We cannot deny that image is ubiquitous in our daily communication. I believe, there is a culture shift towards the image from the written word.

As emoji fever reaches an all-time high,

startup tech company EmojiWorks presents the aptly titled Emoji Keyboard.

If we look through the history, a critical factor in the development of writing and visual communication is their relationship with technology (Crow, 2006).

Through the rise of mobile phone technology, short text messaging is not just about typing in words. From the 1990s, Texting already forms its own grammar and influencing other methods of communication by the invention of “emotions” - using alphabet letter to create pictures (Crow, 2006). Later on, Japanese invented emoji for use on the earliest forms of mobile platforms. The roots of emoji can retrospect to the hieroglyphics of ancient Egypt – the idea of a visual language to communicate (Mack, 2015). The emoji was essentially an afterthought in the development of the mobile phone technology.

Emojis recently attracted the world by storm. There are Emoji appear around press releases, billboards and print. In online media, Emoji caught everyone's eye so quickly as not just a smiling and blinking face. We see them in music videos, TV trailers, they even have the world emoji day (World Emoji Day, 2015). The word of 2015 by Oxford Dictionaries selected the “Face with tears of joy” - the laughing and crying emoji due to "sharp increase in popularity of emoji" around the world last year (OxfordWords, 2015).

This project is going to specify to what extent the emoji effect communication especially in branding throughout the culture shift from words to images. Within the overall aim, therefore, the objectives of study are:

— To analysis how the difference of the meanings using emoji across cultural barriers.

— To assess the extent to what degree people use emoji to communicate to increase the shared understanding.

— To explore the possible future for emoji in branding and advertising.

This blog is going to document this project and the whole reference list can found through email.

#Opinoin