We, living in the Emoji world.
This Documentary film "Emoji among us" by Dissolve examines the far-reaching impact of these very special characters. Believe it or not, Emoji is everywhere adopted by us using in daily communications. In fact, humans have always been exploring emotion through some new kind of typography. With emojis, you are transferring a bit of your creative self and emotional self into a symbol, which adding so much to the conversation and the relationship. The combination of images and words is incredibly powerful. That is where the potential of new things comes.
Traditionally, writing was not supposed to reflect our usual given and taken in our conversation. If you think about punctuation, the main ways to do that in the English system is either an exclamation point for the expression of joy or wonder or ganger and the question mark. This is related specifically to an interrogative form of a language. It is how traditionally people do. However, human have always been interested in exploring emotion through new ways.
One interesting example was an American humor magazine called Puck which way back in 1881. Presented a series of different dashes and parentheses and for to create little faces.
Also in the 1880s, Ambrose Bierce who was writing for the 'San Francisco Examiner.' at that time, he gave a suggestion of what he called a snigger point. And that was a right parenthesis on its side that would look like a simile to indicate a bit of levity.
Then into the 20th century, Vladimir Nabokov was quoted in 'The new york times' that would it be nice again, to have what he called this supine round bracket.
As these varied suggestions were milling around, but none of them were really taken up seriously. However, it changed with the advent of the networked computing.
In 1982, Scott Fahlman recognised that on early internet forums, there was often this kind of communication. It came up with the colon, the dash, right parenthesis to indicate a smiley face. Now people are creative. They are finding new possibilities. In Japan, for instance, they took the idea of emoticons and developed more complex symbols for expressing different types of emotion. And these things developed so quickly, where people previously had not used emoticons very much suddenly find themselves using it quite often.
New tools can create new thoughts and new thoughts demand new tools. In some ways, we have reached the limits of print as a way of expressing ourselves. Those rigid lines on white pages aren't very good at expressing more fluid thoughts. Also, using emojis increased use of irony. We are in an age when beliefs are held more loosely, where we don't believe in the same gods, same morals that we used to. So in a way, we have to modulate, we have to control the degree of seriousness we apply to things. The emojis are much more than mere supplyments. They are going to give us new ways of thinking.