The days of communicating with each other using plain old text alone are long gone. Plain text never was quite enough for us. Even in the good old days of Nokia 3310s and a 160 character SMS limit, we’d still find a way to string characters together to form images. It’s the way we are built. We are visual creatures. 30% of our brains are engaged in processing visual information and this has resulted in 63% percent of social media being made up of images. We just connect with images better, whether they are worth a thousand words or are just pictures of grumpy cats. They are more emotionally appealing to us, and we use them to express emotion better- for what is communication without the emotion? It is just plain difficult to express nuance of emotion with text alone. How can you know if someone is being completely serious or tongue-in-cheek without the visual cues that come with face to face conversation? It would be tedious to have to describe your intention every time you typed something, not to mention a complete waste of space. How important is it to speak with pictures(emojis) to express exactly how to feel? [emojot type = “button” size=”small” key=”5770bdd408a69b2050a9764f” id=”5770bba70409e08c75a46b04_5770d7880409e08c75a46b1f” clientid=”f94_CMbTqFr0bsAIgoHD5PHe4V8a” clientsecret=”Hf5VbRwNRbmt7Bfg3dOyAkILAH4a”] Emojis are pictographs created by the Japanese in the late 1990s. They come from the Japanese words for “picture” and “character” and were used to denote common expressions people made and things they were familiar with. It was genius. Emojis enabled whole new levels and nuances of communication that were just not available before. There’s a whole generation of people, who grew up with online messaging platforms like Yahoo! and MSN Messenger for whom emojis and emoticons are a second language. In fact, according to Professor Evans of Bangor University, emoji […]
A University of Pennsylvania study notes that, “70% of communication is body language, 23% is voice tone and inflection, and only 7% is your spoken words!” (Source). Text based communication from email to texting created many challenges – until ‘smileys’ – now commonly called ‘emojis’, became popular. Tyler Schnoebelen, a linguistics Ph.D. from Stanford, explains how if we are talking to someone face to face, we don’t need another way to express “I’m smiling” because it would presumably be visible (NYMAG). But take away that added layer of interaction, and then you are missing something important in communication. It all comes down to emotion and the communication of it. When face-to-face communication is not possible, we need to find some other way of communicating emotion and humanizing a system that is otherwise rather stark. But then the question arises, if this is how it works in the context of interpersonal communication, what does a brand do? How should a business or a service communicate with its customer base? When people communicate with each other with such rich expression of emotion, how much sense does it make for a business to communicate in a plain text form that is decades old at best? The availability of technology allows for a mix of rich forms of media, be it text, images, sound or animation. It doesn’t make sense for a business not to make use of these when communicating with people, especially since this is how people communicate with each other. Some of the biggest brands and media presences have acknowledged this fact and have been speaking emoji for a while. In 2014, as part of its content marketing strategy, General Electric launched its Emoji Table of Experiments, which they turned into a web series on science.
It’s a debate that’s sweeping the internet. What is the plural of the word emoji? Some say it’s “emoji,” others say “emojis.” The word emoji comes from the Japanese words “e,” meaning picture and “moji,” meaning character. Following the rules of the Japanese language, there would be no “s” used to make the word plural.Did you know that the word emoji originated from Japan? However, many English grammatical organizations have taken stands in favor of the plural “emojis.” Mark Allen, a board member of the American Copy Editors Society wrote in an email to The New York Observer, “when words enter English, we usually make them play by our rules, so I think ’emojis’ has the edge.” The Associated Press and dictionary.com seem to agree with Allen. Both sources have “emojis” listed as the plural of the word.How do you feel about using the word “emojis” as the plural of the word “emoji”? A study performed by emojipedia.org in May of 2016 shows trends in searches for emoji pluralization. As of May, “emoji” was still the most popular pluralization, however “emoji” was trending steadily downward as “emojis” was trending upward. It looks like there is no concrete answer yet. Maybe time will tell, or maybe we will never know. Overall, what matters is which version of emoji plural you want to use.
