Emojis are taking over the Internet

A picture may be worth a thousand words, though apparently little yellow faces are worth even more: Over 700 million emojis are shared every day on Facebook, and 250 million a month on Twitter . An astronomical amount that demonstrates the global impact of these smiley faces and symbols in pop culture.

It all started in 1990 , when the Japanese mobile operator NTT created a collection of 176 drawings that would eventually give birth to the Internet’s universal language , though it was not until 2008 , when Apple launched its first emoji catalogue, that emojis became an international trend.

There is a total of 2,823 emojis approved by the Unicode computing industry standard , which handles the consistent encoding and representation of the world’s writing systems and symbols on the Internet.

According to a study by the Brandwatch consulting firm on the use of Twitter worldwide, emojis are more often used by women (61%) than men (39%) , and are mostly used to express positive emotions (75% of the time) .

Two years ago, emojis expressing fear reached a historic high in the period leading to the Brexit referendum , whereas emojis expressing sadness peaked in May 2017 after the terrorist attacks in Manchester . The use of icons expressing joy increases considerably during Christmas and New Year .

Some of the most commonly used emojis are the laughing face with tears in its eyes , as well as the red heart , according to data from several social networks.

The emoji repertoire increases year by year and it has made people wonder if these icons will eventually replace text messages, to which Joaquín Müller, head of the BBVA Foundation , replied: “Every new social communication code helps to enrich language, and not the other way around.”

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The use of emojis has increased due to text message constraints. The use of these icons usually “reinforces speech, adding humor or expressing a more specific emotion.”

Throughout history, emojis have been controversial, sparking critics due to a lack of racial or gender variety which led companies such as Apple , Google , Samsung , and Twitter to include all races and genders on some of their emojis. Some service providers have also decided to change the pistol emoji for a water pistol, in view of the gun control movement in the United States.

Just like any other code, emojis allow for nuances and polysemy through their use in different contexts. For example, according to a study conducted by Emojipedia , the peach emoji makes an explicit reference to the fruit only 7% of times . Two out of three users use both the peach and the eggplant emojis with sexual connotations .

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