24 July 2018

History of Emoticons and Emojis

Any social media user has used an emoji or an emoticon at some point. The two though used for the same purpose are different and have different origins as well. One is of English origins and the other of Japanese origins. The resemblance between the two is considered to be purely coincidental.

Emoticons
An emoticon is a facial expression that is presented using various characters. Mainly, punctuation marks, numbers and letters. They are used to express a person’s feelings, mood and expression. Emoticons can also be used as a time-saving method. This is because a few emoticons can have the same meaning as words in a sentence.

History of Emoticons
The first emoticons were introduced in 1982, by Scott Fahlam. He was a computer scientist at Carnegie University. This man is also commonly regarded as the Father of Emoticons. Despite their introduction in the 1980’s, they were first used in 1972 on the Plato IV computer system.

Emoticons became more popular as the internet became popular. As a result, they became widely used in text messages and emails including Australian online pokies. They have also played a great role in communication through technology. They give a more complete expression of feeling and tone.

Emojis
Emoji are graphic symbols that represent an idea or concept regardless of language, words or phrases. They are mainly used in social media messaging. They exist to express various emotions and feelings. Emoji can also be used to sum-up messages and make text shorter. They are like emoticons, but emoji are actual pictures and emoticons are not.

History
Emoji first appeared in Japanese mobile phones around 1999. They are pictographs. A pictograph is a picture that conveys meaning and is based on resemblance to a physical object. For instance, casino game emoji’s at online casino sa or flower emoji’s on WhatsApp.

They, however, became popular after the 2010’s when they were added to several mobile operating systems. They now play a large role in the fields of social media. Popular platforms that use emoji are Twitter, WhatsApp, Facebook and Skype just to mention a few.