Let’s do an experiment. Grab your phone and open up your text messages. Scroll through a text thread until you land on an emoji. Chances are you didn’t have to scroll very far if at all, right?
For the past few years, emoji have been taking up prime space in our digital conversations. But they’ve actually been around since the 1990s, when a man named Shigetaka Kurita invented them while working at Japanese telecom company NTT Docomo. Emoji were a way to appeal to teens who were messaging and to distinguish Docomo from other competitors.
But it wasn’t until Apple introduced an easily accessible emoji keyboard in iOS 5 that an emoji text culture really started to take shape internationally. That was in 2011.
Fast forward to today, 2015. Emoji are everywhere, and have greater meaning than ever. They’ve left their original home wedged in between “LOL” and “omg” or simply floating alone in a text bubble. Sure, they’re still tacked on at the end of tweets or an Instagram captions, but they’ve transcended the original purpose Kurita and Docomo intended for them. While emoji once had a symbiotic relationship with words, the cartoonish icons have begun to stand on their own — carrying their own weight, meaning and role.
Emoji goes to the movies
The most extreme example of just how far emoji have come is in the fact that Sony Pictures Animation won a bidding war in July over an emoji movie in a deal valued at up to almost seven figures.
While a deal is far from a theatrical release, that the deal even happened at all speaks to the how far emoji have ascended as a cultural force.
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