The Visualisation Of Language: Emojis

Emojis

Extract from the Semiotics of Emoji: The Rise of Visual Language in the Age of the Internet
by Marcel Danesi

Notes from articles:

• Digital communications have always been a little socially handicapped. Unlike the written and typed communiques that came before, digital mixes immediacy with intimacy in a way that strips nuance and drains context. But emoji are more than emotional punctuation. They add context, enable wordplay, insert nuance, and let you speak your mind while taking the edge off your message. They're tone-of-voice for a medium that has no tone and no voice.

• The question is whether emoji will ride their cultural appeal long enough to become a discrete, complete means of communication. Or emoji might be a lexical fad, here for now but gone as soon as this wave of digital natives hands control of the global village over to the next generation.

• Emoji means picture (e) character (moji). It's a Japanese portmanteau

• Docomo, a Japanese telecoms giant, invented emoji in the 1990s to sweeten their countrymen to texting. Spoken, written, lived Japanese is rich with context, honorifics, and layers of meaning. Perhaps more than anybody speaking English or a European language could imagine, Japan needed some way to indicate the tone of a text.

• Links to the pictoral values of the Japaneese/ Chinese written language

• Before emoji there were kaomoji—those looked kinda like this: ╮(￣～￣)╭, (o_O), and (=｀ω´=). And before that there were emoticons :-).

• Cute and creative, but those older forms require a lot of typing, which on phones means tapping, which in the 1990s meant pecking at numeral buttons. By creating a standardized Unicode library of images, emoji took the finger work out of typing context into your texts.

• Emoji are clever, are puns, are art, are jokes about art, are games, are songs, are stories. So when you think about them that way, they start to seem like a language.

• an embryonic language, a cluster of cells that might be a language some day.

• "A pidgin is a new language created when people who have two languages come together," says Susan Herring, a linguist at Indiana University who has been studying the way people talk on the Internet since 1990. Pidgins are typically created out of extreme necessity—they are trade languages, slave languages, refugee languages. Emoji, though, are mostly fun. And the users typically come from the same linguistic background. So not quite a pidgin, but still some of the linguistic structural constraints might still be relevant.

• all the little linking words that we take for granted but give English the power to identify, modify, and look at things far away in space and time. Words like: "the," "in," "around," "into," "apart from," "beside," "by," "as," and "instead."These aspects only come along if a pidgin is passed along to another generation. This is when a pidgin becomes a creole. Creoles have tense, nuance, and grammar. The fact that creoles develop these tells us two things:
• 1. Languages are emergent.
• 2. Children evolve languages.

• "Adolescents are the real movers and shakers in linguistic change," says Penelope Eckert, a linguist at Stanford University. "They are the ones who lead in the terms of dialectic difference and ultimately language difference. You got the romance languages by people speaking language differently. Same goes for regional dialects and ethnic dialects. It’s the process of social differentiation. Teenagers are much busier in that process than older people."

• On the other hand, think about cool, whatever, chillin', hanging out. Think about all the ways you use the word 'like' every single day. Think about the fact that hip hop survived some of the worst possible corporate co-opting in the 1990s. Consider emoji in the context of all the other linguistic innovations people owe to digital communication—not just emoticons and kaomoji, but netspeak, lolspeak, dogespeak, 13375p3ak, reaction gifs, memes, lol, brb, jk. "It's possible that emoji, like other Internet languages, will get absorbed into regular online writing," says Herring.

• Humans love language, and we love playing with language, and any time we find a new method of communicating we are going to play and experiment with it. At least for a while. The fate of emoji is the same as the fate of English: ¯＼_(ツ)_/¯.

• With its poodles, noodles and happy poos, Emoji is now the fastest growing language in the UK. What a huge step back for humanity

• Emoji, the visual system of communication that is incredibly popular online, is Britain’s fastest-growing language according to Professor Vyv Evans, a linguist at Bangor University.

• "As a visual language emoji has already far eclipsed hieroglyphics, its ancient Egyptian precursor which took centuries to develop,” says Evans.

• After millennia of painful improvement, from illiteracy to Shakespeare and beyond, humanity is rushing to throw it all away.

• Demand is massive: 72% of 18- to 25-year-olds find it easier to express their feelings in emoji pictures than through the written word, according to a survey for Talk Talk mobile.

• The Egyptians created a magnificent but static culture. They invented a superb artistic style and powerful mythology – then stuck with these for millennia. Hieroglyphs enabled them to write spells but not to develop a more flexible, questioning literary culture: they left that to the Greeks.

• The year 2015 could be called the year of the emoji. They have landed a teenage boy in a police cell and prompted Vladimir Putin’s wrath in Russia, and the loveable smiley faces are even set to come to life in their own Hollywood film. Emoji are now used in around half of every sentence on sites like Instagram, and Facebook looks set to introduce them alongside the famous “like” button as a way of expression your reaction to a post.

• some outlets have claimed that emoji are an emerging language that could soon compete with English in global usage. To many, this would be an exciting evolution of the way we communicate; to others, it is linguistic Armageddon.

• When emoji appear with text, they often supplement or enhance the writing. This is similar to gestures that appear along with speech. Over the past three decades, research has shown that our hands provide important information that often transcends and clarifies the message in speech. Emoji serve this function too – for instance, adding a kissy or winking face can disambiguate whether a statement is flirtatiously teasing or just plain mean.

• This is a key point about language use: rarely is natural language ever limited to speech alone. When we are speaking, we constantly use gestures to illustrate what we mean. For this reason, linguists say that language is “multi-modal”. Writing takes away that extra non-verbal information, but emoji may allow us to re-incorporate it into our text.

• According to research by Tyler Schnoebelen, people often create strings of emoji that share a common meaning

• These emoji could be arranged in any order and still convey the same meaning. This sequence has little internal structure; even when it is rearranged, it still conveys the same message. These images are connected solely by their broader meaning. We might consider them to be a visual list: “here are all things related to celebrations and birthdays.” Lists are certainly a conventionalised way of communicating, but they don’t have grammar the way that sentences do.

• In the 1970s, deaf homesigners in Nicaragua were brought together in a school for the first time. In sharing their own individual systems with each other, a more complex system began to emerge, which grew to the richness of a full language as new cohorts entered the school. The result was a new Nicaraguan sign language, which is still developing.

• Emoji are created by typing into a computer like text. But, unlike text, most emoji are provided as whole units, except for the limited set of emoticons which convert to emoji, like :) or ;). When writing text, we use the building blocks (letters) to create the units (words), not by searching through a list of every whole word in the language. Drawings are similar, combining simple building blocks (lines and shapes) to make larger units (representational drawings).

• Emoji force us to convey information in a linear unit-unit string, which limits how complex expressions can be made. These constraints may mean that they will never be able to achieve even the most basic complexity that we can create with normal and natural drawings.

• What’s more, these limits also prevent users from creating novel signs – a requisite for all languages, especially emerging ones. Users have no control over the development of the vocabulary. As the “vocab list” for emoji grows, it will become increasingly unwieldy: using them will require a conscious search process through an external list, not an easy generation from our own mental vocabulary, like the way we naturally speak or draw. This is a key point – it means that emoji lack the flexibility needed to create a new language.

• The irony is that the focus on emoji has meant that many have neglected that we already have very robust visual languages, as can be seen in comics and graphic novels. As I argue in my book, The Visual Language of Comics, the drawings found in comics use a systematic visual vocabulary (such as stink lines to represent smell, or stars to represent dizziness). Importantly, the available vocabulary is not constrained by technology and has developed naturally over time, like spoken and written languages.

• the visual language used in comics creates “grammatical” sequences of images in a way that makes them much more similar to spoken or sign languages. In this case, the grammar of sequential images is more of a narrative structure – not of nouns and verbs. Yet, these sequences use principles of combination like any other grammar, including roles played by images, groupings of images, and hierarchic embedding.

• In an experiment published last year in the journal Neuropsychologia, we measured participants’ brainwaves while they viewed sequences one image at a time where a disruption appeared either within the groupings of panels or at the natural break between groupings. The particular brainwave responses that we observed were similar to those that experimenters find when violating the syntax of sentences. That is, the brain responds the same way to violations of “grammar”, whether in sentences or sequential narrative images.

• emoji are still very useful for enhancing and enriching the text of our contemporary digital conversations and interactions, injecting a note of humour, affection or even melancholy into the most concise message. Their increasing popularity serves as a reminder that there is a lot more to our communication than words alone. However, they pale in comparison to the richness or complexity of both natural written languages and the visual languages that already exist in the drawings we have used for millennia. 

• Dating app Tinder is spearheading a proposal to create interracial couple emojis and submitted its suggestion to the Unicode Consortium in February 2018. The company is asking for 21 different sequences with various skin tones, including same-sex couples.
• Tinder said: “It may seem like there’s an emoji for everything, but that’s not the case. While emojis for people of colour and emojis for same-sex couples both became a reality in 2015, one group of people is still excluded from emoji representation: interracial couples.”

• If you look around, you’ll notice that our world is already filled with symbols to simplify the physical world; we can only accept that this will become a larger part of our digital world as well.

• Business Insider reported that use of emojis in marketing grew by 775% in 2016.
• This month, Apple presented a new type of emoji together with the new iPhone 8 and iPhone X. The animojis are animated versions of the popular emoji and use the face-scanning features of the iPhone X to create custom 3D versions based on your own facial expressions.

This shows the technological progression from 2d to 3d in populist visualisation outputs and the need for personalisation - will we begin to live through these characters? Essentially is that not what we are already doing? Does this present a strong universal language that connects us all? Are we therefore more equal? 

'Emoji have become an inescapable part of our daily lives. This short film examines the far-reaching impact of these very special characters.'
(mock)Documentary-style under 2 minute video on the prevalence of emojis in our everyday lives - and interesting design approach to emphasise their value within our present culture. The David Attenborough-style voice over reflects this and provides and pensive take on the world on emojis through comical satire.

Marketing Emoji Campaigns:

-       Seems to be that the stupidity of it is actually what builds conversation

-       Irony

-       Ease and efficiency

Hollywood movies:
Deadpool

Deadpool’s emoji marketing campaign is probably one of the biggest success of a marketing campaign using emojis. According to Ryan Reynolds, the whole thing started as a pun in the WhatsApp group of the production members. Just a silly joke between colleagues who went crazy and decided to put it on the streets.

Even AdWeek called it “so stupid it’s genius”. The ad finally went viral and helped Deadpool break all the box office records for an R-rated movie.

Fast Food 
Dominos

Instead of using them to tell stories, Domino’s decided to use emojis to offer its customers greater convenience to order pizzas. They introduced a chatbot feature to allow customers to order using a single pizza emoji.

Just during the first day (before going viral), it was reported that more than 500 people across the US used the emoji ordering system. Additionally, this concept for delivering through emojis won a Titanium Grand Prix at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

McDonald's

The cool thing about this emoji marketing campaign is that they tell their stories just using emojis. They manage to be empathic with people who are having a bad day and make it funny by playing with stereotypes at the same time. It proves that an idea doesn’t need to be complicated in order to be effective.

Brands/Companies:


Durex
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=10&v=O7iKgKpkWfU
In this campaign the company used the emoji language as well as its widespread audience to both promote the brand and safe sex. It sought that by advocating for a condom emoji it would both be progressing on a social matter, whilst expanding the brand awareness as whenever someone clicked on the emoji to send they would associate Durex. 

Durex found through a survey that 60% of young people are uncomfortable discussing safe sex and that 72% find it easier to express emotions using emojis. Based on these results, Durex decided to use emojis to promote safe sex (and their product) which lead to an increase in awareness and in positive brand perception.

Ikea

Ikea believe men and women would get along better if they just had more domestically themed emojis to help them communicate properly in their text messages, and so created a set as part of their 2015 campaign. 

The keyboard offers cartoon versions of recognisable Ikea items, such as the Billy bookshelf and Swedish meatballs. It also includes household items such as a laundry basket and vacuum cleaner, as well as more quirky icons such as a half-eaten apple and a cat.
Ikea say the idea is to help arguing couples communicate better over who does the chores, although in reality, the company has simply thought up a clever way to push its furniture visually.

Designer Fashion:
Diesel 

Using Emoji's for social change:
WWF

In order to create awareness about animals who are in danger of extinction, WWF created 17 emojis of endangered animals and encouraged users to donate 10p every time they retweeted one.

WWF’s #EndangeredEmoji Twitter campaign received around 559,000 mentions and more than 59,000 signups in the first three months since it was released.

This was a super easy and clever way of utilising popular culture to affect positive change. Simultaneously raising awareness and finding a solution through a minimum effort and maximum output concept. In this way, emoji's can be seen as a useful visual communication device. 


Conclusion:

1. Emojis are a great additional element to text in order to convey emotion and TONE OF VOICE that was otherwise lost with text language
2. the ‘Face with Tears of Joy’ (technically an ‘emoji’) was selected Oxford Dictionaries 2015 Word of the Year. Brands are also increasingly using emojis to gain attention.
3. Emoji has been adopted the world over meaning you can communicate with the same icons to someone on the other side of the planet. Sending little photos can make communication across languages much easier.
4. In the same way that we use body language in face-to-face conversations, emojis and emoticons reduce the risk of ambiguity in messages.
5. Emojis were originally invented with the intention to keep up with the pace of technology by conveying messages with a flick. Today, they can be seen as a means of expression, in our day to day life as well as many advertising and social media campaigns. They were inspired by the Manga art.
6. Strictly speaking emoji is not a language. It’s a form of communication. The emoji adds an element that’s missing from text-based communication. It is best likened to the social cues that we get when we communicate in spoken language. Those are non-linguistic.
7. A smile means the same thing more or less whether you speak English, French, Japanese or Swahili. However, there are cultural differences in how emoji are used The praying hands emoji in Western culture relates to represents religious seminary. But that’s not the origin of the emoji. It’s from Japanese culture where it relates to a conventional sign that people make to say please and to thank somebody.