The Evolution Of Emoji With Advancement In Technology
One of the main motives for rapid growth in technology has been its ability to transcend physical boundaries with communication. Over the last few decades, there has been a tremendous advancement in communication technologies, leaving the current era called the Information Age. Many users of smartphones today do not even know of the day when all telephones were landlines or that you couldn’t use the internet and the phone at the same time. Perhaps the largest contributor to the advancement in communication technologies has been the widespread adoption of internet capabilities accessible on mobile devices. This has contributed to the evolution of the mannerisms in which people communicate today. Specifically, when looking into the evolution of text-based communication, the advancement in technology has presented new affordances to communicate via the introduction of emojis.
Texting became popular as a form of communication after the widespread adoption of mobile phones. Back then, the phones usually carried a low resolution screen, just enough to render legible text. Mobile phones were much smaller than phones today, although they were significantly bulkier. The smaller size of the phone limited the size of the keyboard it could have, therefore resulting in keyboards that didn’t have enough room to house the twenty six english letters and additional commonly used punctuation. This is what led to the creation of the T9 keyboard.
Due to the limitations of phones’ screen resolutions and T9 keyboards, phones could only afford to support basic ASCII text. When people realized that they can make symbols that resembled faces with ASCII text, the emoticon was born. Emoticons became a popular way of expressing sentiments in a way that normal text couldn’t convey.
The introduction of touchscreen mobile phones changed the game. Touchscreen phones often had larger screens than their historic counterparts, but what led to the evolution of emoticons to emoji was the fact that the keyboard was now a part of the screen, as opposed to a physical keyboard. This allowed for dynamically being able to change the characters that each key inputs. On top of that, the characters weren’t limited to representing strictly ASCII characters. This feature, along with larger real estate for keyboards provided the affordance for emoji to be born.
The rise of the popularity of emoji can also be partially attested to the increasing popularity of mobile phones. It became a normal thing for even students in school to have. The next big advancement in technology that played a huge role in the widespread adoption of emoji was the development of smartphones. Smartphones operated on a model in which various software components of the phone itself can be swapped with different apps. This allowed for people to entirely switch the keyboards they used, the set of emoji the phone renders, use different messaging apps with custom emoji support, and more. Concurrently, the internet was become a widely used and available utility with the adoption of mobile data networks.
The evolution of emoji and their use can be directly correlated with the advancement of communications technology. New features on phones such as touchscreens and interchangeable apps, and developments in infrastructure such as widespread data networks has provided the affordances necessary for emoji to evolve. But what’s next? Where will the advancement in technology lead us?
One guess of a future outlook that is already taking place is the ever increasing use of integrated images as a medium of communication. Certain messaging apps integrate features that allow quickly searching for images and gifs. On top of that, with the advancement of mobile phone cameras, people have been using their cameras as another medium of communication. Snapchat and Instagram stories have gathered millions of users, and their primary principle is the notion that the camera is the new keyboard. What this may show us is that the future of asynchronous communication will evolve greatly beyond simply using text. It will incorporate many different forms of media.
