Let EMOJIS do the talking

What happens to conversations when picture letters go wild on smartphones?

The above conversation (in the picture) may well sound like Greek—er, sorry, emoji—to you. Allow us to translate:

‘Hi! What’s up? Do you want to meet for coffee?’

‘I could actually do with a beer. Let’s meet at eight?’

‘Great! See you soon. Bye.’

‘Bye!’

There was once a time people used those cute-looking emoticons to depict different emotions while using chat software on their desktops. The colon and closed bracket 🙂 stood for a smile; and should you use an open bracket instead, as in 🙁 , it meant a sad face. The semi-colon and closed bracket 😉 meant a wink.

When we had just begun getting used to these simple emoticons, the smartphone era dawned upon us. Every other person had a BlackBerry, and began using yellow-faced emoticons to animate their BBM conversations. And no, the yellow faces had nothing to do with The Simpsons, lest you expect Homer Simpson to say, ‘Doh’. They were, however, far better and allowed users to convey a variety of emotions, with some people even resorting to cheat-sheets to discover emotions not listed in their phone’s icon menu. But even that is now passé.

It is the age of the ‘emoji’. The word, which means ‘picture letter’, originated almost two decades ago in Japan, and has begun to take over smartphone communication with little symbols and pictures. Shigetaka Kurita, the ‘father of emojis’, is said to have been inspired by Japanese manga comics and kanji characters when he created the set that is most popular these days, especially on WhatsApp. It has pictures that depict a dancer, nail paint, an aeroplane, a hospital, saké, and many others that have edged out the abominable lingo of the early days of SMS (remember ‘Hi. Hw ru? Lts mt at 8. K gr8. C u soon’?).

“This concept isn’t new,” says Kavin Bharti Mittal, head of product and strategy, Hike Messenger, “It’s just better; you’ve probably sent out messages with keyboard characters—emojis or stickers enable you to share characters in graphic form and give you a plethora of options.” Hike Messenger, which made its debut two years ago, is India’s answer to WhatsApp, and has quite an eclectic collection of stickers, as Mittal calls them—such as Rajinikanth, the Doordarshan logo, and the omnipresent nimbu-mirchi.

Emojis, which so far were widely used only in Japan, made their way to India around four years ago. The popularity of the chat software WhatsApp made them ubiquitous, with many people using them without even knowing what they’re called. Take, for instance, Delhi- based researcher Shubhi Vijay. “When I first started using them four years ago, I called them ‘emoticons’ and then I realised more people were calling them ‘emojis’. So I adapted,” she says. Speaking of their attraction, Mumbai-based Shinmin Bali says, “Having an emoji in addition to text acts as the closest replacement of a change of facial expression or voice modulation while having a conversation. The fact that there are so many of them displaying various moods act as a top-up.”

In response to the demands of an audience hungry for new ideas, one that has adopted American style symbols with gusto—the hot dog emoji, for example, or the middle-finger one—there are now social networks and mobile applications such as Emoji.li, Emojicate and Stephen dedicated exclusively to emojis.

For the uninitiated, on Emojicate, an app that made its Apple Store debut in August and will soon be available for Android phones, you can only express yourself through emojis. And you can set the ‘clock’ emoji to a time you prefer, something that the usual emoji menus do not allow. Says Nick Kendal, the app’s originator, in an email interview, ‘With the advent of smartphones and software keyboards, we have seen [emojis] become much more commonplace, especially since the adoption of an international standard with the Unicode consortium.’ Adds Kendal, ‘A user doesn’t have to be literate to use emojis. They can compose messages based on what they’re doing and how they feel without typing a single letter. This opens up huge opportunities for people to compose messages, who may not have done so before.’

Indeed, the classic smiley emoji would be understood by anyone across the globe, regardless of the language he or she speaks. The fun part, however, is that the same emoji can often be interpreted in different ways. As Rajiv Arora, a communications professional who uses emojis frequently, says, “Every emoji can convey a different meaning depending on the context, so they lend flexibility and variety. For example, a smiley can be used to just acknowledge a message or as a replacement for ‘thanks’ or even to politely end a conversation.” He began using emojis around three years ago simply because they were there, and mostly because “the initial confusion on when to use which emoji made conversations quite hilarious”.

You would have seen what look like emojis on Google’s Hangout app, Facebook’s messenger app and on Viber. Purists, however, would scoff that these are mere ‘stickers’. The difference between emojis and stickers, in their view, is that the former are essentially text- sized images whereas the ones on Viber and Facebook are, as Kendal says, ‘larger illustrated images which can be inserted into messages, which are typically referred to as ‘ stickers’ rather than emojis.’

So you have a crying dog sticker, a fat cat sticker, Pink Panther stickers and those that commemorate special occasions, such as Diwali and Christmas.

For Ankit Pandey, co-founder and executive director of Bold Kiln, a full spectrum end-to-end solutions provider for startups, the emojis on Hike and WhatsApp are funny, deliver a quick and crisp message, and are easy to use. However, when asked if emoji-exclusive social networks will ever work in India, he says, “An Emojli or an Emojicate might work for the youth in the West, but unless you deep dive in to the habits, notions and thought process of the Indian youth, you wouldn’t know if this would work or not.” He feels such ‘fun’ things might lose steam once something better comes up. “Pop culture fades every month.”

On the other hand, when asked about his take on such social networks, Mittal says, “As a platform, we believe in offering our users the freedom to express [themselves] through text, emoticons, stickers and a lot more. If users wish to converse only with stickers, we’ll simply enable that. Of the 10 billion plus monthly messaging volume, stickers contribute to close to 30 per cent of the traffic, accounting for 3 billion sticker shares.”

Should you count yourself among those who take pride in calling themselves ‘emojiks’ (an ‘emoji geek’, that is), there’s a real-time emoji tracker available too (Emojitracker.com). This website tracks the emojis most commonly used on Twitter, in real-time. The popular ones include: the smiling face, the cool dude, face blowing a kiss, the victory hand, and, of course, the heart. Among the least used are the floppy disk, pager and card index.

Oh, and the love for emojis doesn’t end here. It would help to take more than just a cursory look at your smartphone’s emoji menu. Herman Melville’s classic novel, Moby Dick, has been translated into emoji by data engineer Fred Benenson; Kate Perry’s song Roar was recently translated; and Community actor Gillian Jacobs took up the emoji movie challenge, where she had to guess iconic Hollywood movies via emojis. And there are people who sing emoji karaoke as well! Good luck translating our Bollywood songs into emoji, though. Anybody up for it?

About The Author

Shreya Sethuraman