Emoticons, Kaomoji, and Emoji

The Transformation of Communication in the Digital Age

Elena Giannoulis, Lukas R.A. Wilde, Elena Giannoulis, Lukas R.A. Wilde

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429958847
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Linguistica

This collection offers a comprehensive treatment of emoticons, kaomoji, and emoji, examining these digital pictograms and ideograms from a range of perspectives to comprehend their increasing role in the transformation of communication in the digital age. Featuring a detailed introduction and eleven contributions from an interdisciplinary group of scholars, the volume begins by outlining the history and development of the field, situating emoticons, kaomoji, and emoji – expressing a variety of moods and emotional states, facial expressions, as well as all kinds of everyday objects– as both a topic of global relevance but also within multimodal, semiotic, picture theoretical, cultural and linguistic research. The book shows how the interplay of these systems with text can alter and shape the meaning and content of messaging and examines how this manifests itself through different lenses, including the communicative, socio-political, aesthetic, and cross-cultural. Making the case for further study on emoticons, kaomoji, and emoji and their impact on digital communication, this book is key reading for students and scholars in sociolinguistics, media studies, Japanese studies, and language and communication.

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Emoticons, Kaomoji, and Emoji

The Transformation of Communication in the Digital Age

Elena Giannoulis and Lukas R.A. Wilde

Emoji, emoticons, and kaomoji play an important role in everyday communication using devices such as smartphones, tablets, or notebooks.¹ Although we use them frequently in chats and in social media, or for this very reason, we might not think deeply about how they change our communication. Often, these small and colorful ideograms and pictograms are used in a playful and entertaining way. They help us to add a certain ‘tone’ to the written word, to express irony, to emphasize or to neutralize a message. They can round off communication and give the written word a soft or gentle touch. Sometimes they merely visualize what was said directly before. Without realizing it, we have become addicted to using them and have started to expect a laughing emoji at the end of a chat in order to feel comfortable. When emoji are not even used once, we might feel that the sender is somehow cold, distant, and impolite or we might ask ourselves if the communication went smoothly or not. Is the written word no longer sufficient? What do digital ideograms and pictograms add to communication? When did we start to use emoji, emoticons, or kaomoji, and why? How do we define them, and how can we distinguish them from one another? In what ways, and in which contexts, do we use them and when exactly? Moreover, nowadays emoji are, primarily, not only a part of digital communication but have also found their way into social debates, economy, art, and even literature. Surprisingly, research has not paid much attention to them so far.

The present volume is the first interdisciplinary and transcultural attempt to reflect systematically on the impact of emoji, emoticons, and kaomoji. It attempts to connect reflections on the communicative, semi-otic, sociopolitical, and aesthetic transformations of the global cultural landscape via these ideograms and pictograms. Are they, as it is often stated, a global language? That is to say, are they a chance to communicate across cultures, or are they early indicators of a decline and degeneration of (written) language? What potential do they have and where are the limits of their success story?

A Short Survey on the State of Emoji, Emoticon, and Kaomoji Research

As has been retold countless times by now, the ‘face with tears of joy’ emoji

was chosen as the “Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2015”. Paradoxically enough, it is precisely not a word. Emoji are digital pictograms or ideograms encoded in Unicode, the standard by which computers represent text. The Unicode codepoint for the ‘face of tears with joy’ is U+1F602, which software on computers and phones can render or ‘translate’ into preconstructed and largely standardized pictorial characters. Like all its ‘digital colleagues’ within the rapidly evolving repertoire of emoji characters, the ‘face with tears of joy’ will look slightly different on various platforms and operating systems (WhatsApp, Facebook, and Twitter use different sets of emoji, as do Apple, Google, or Microsoft) while at the same time conforming to a given Unicode description. Bethany Berard, in her comprehensive overview on the production of emoji, finds that “[e]moji are thus ‘codified’ in both a technical and a social sense as both the technical code point of the characters is standardized, while the designation of an official name codifies a dominant or traditional reading and an implied correct usage” (Berard 2018, n.pag.). Popular online articles on “12 commonly misunderstood emojis” (Beall 2016) nevertheless attest the enormous potential for emoji-misunderstandings and diverging “cultural codings” (Danesi 2017, 31). To date, the Unicode Standard 11.0 (in effect since May 21, 2018) contains a repertoire of 2,528 emoji characters. If Unicode characters that serve as components to emoji, for example, skin modified variants, are counted, the total number of emoji is 2,789. For Unicode 12.0 a number of 236 new emoji were included as candidates, out of which 61 have been accepted. They were released on March 5, 2019.² On average, we see the addition of 60 new ones per year, and so far not a single one has been removed from the repertoire.³ Although—or maybe precisely because—emoji are not ‘words’ in any strict sense, it has been argued that they have the potential to make language barriers increasingly obsolete. In a recent monograph on emoji, for instance, linguist and communication scholar Vyvyan Evans opens the discussion with the statement that “[e]moji is, today, incontrovertibly the world’s first truly universal form of communication” (Evans 2017, 20). Note that Evans deliberately uses the term communication instead of language, clarifying even before that “[e]moji is not a language in the way that, say, English, French or Japanese are languages” (19). While this difference may be small but crucial, it remains a fact that scarcely a day passes without emoji being discussed as a new ‘universal language’ in one journalistic article or the other. The organizers of the Emoji Art and Design Show, arranged by New York City‘s Eyebeam Art + Technology Center, famously coined the term of a “new visual vernacular” as early as 2013.⁴

For some, that is a reason to celebrate; for others, a sign of decay, of the loss of the importance of ‘actual’ language. Predigital predecessors, such as ‘stick-figure faces’ made up of punctuation marks and letters, have been in existence since the second half of the 19th century. When the 16th president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, gave a speech in 1862, the audience’s response was recorded by the typesetters as “(applause and laughter;)” (Evans 2017, 150). Although this was certainly a marginal phenomenon back in those days, similar forms of facial representations have been used ever since in handwriting, as well as in print, to humorously enrich texts by adding emotional nuances through nonverbal communication. In 1963, stick-figure faces were rediscovered and transformed when the U.S. American commercial artist Harvey Ball designed the first ‘smiley’. The invention of digital emoticons is attributed to Scott E. Fahlman who used :-) and :-(in a discussion forum at Carnegie Mellon University in 1982 (see Fahlman 1982). The term emoticon is composed of emotion and icon and can be understood as a representation of a facial expression composed entirely of regular ASCII characters, a standard set of digital codes representing letters and symbols (‘American Standard Code for Information Interchange’). Emoticons could quickly be found in Instant Messaging (IM), chats, emails, social networking services (SNS), Short Message Service (SM) text messages, or blogs. The most commonly used emoticons, the ‘smileys’, have since become an integral part of digital communication. A distinct Japanese form of emoticons, particularly open for creative expression, is called kaomoji, 顔文字 (facial characters). Regular emoticons are horizontally oriented and usually do not rely on more than four ASCII characters, while kaomoji are oriented vertically and sometimes created from 20 characters or more. In contrast to ‘Western’ emoticons where most attention is paid to representing the mouth, the most important part of kaomoji are the eyes. A typical example would be (^ ▽ ^) as an expression for ‘joy’, or (>_<) for ‘embarrassment’. Often, kaomoji also include body parts, various ‘props’, or more than one represented personage. For example, (*^o^)，／(^^*) depicts two characters giving a ‘high five‘to each other. As Risa Matsuda points out in her contribution to this volume, there is almost no limit to the range of creative variations that kaomoji representations allow for.

In contrast, emoji, 絵文字 (picture/image character), which are often considered to be an evolution of earlier ASCII-based signs, were invented not earlier than 1998 by Kurita Shigetaka for the Japanese mobile phone operator NTT DoCoMo on the i-mode Project (mobile internet access service).⁵ His emoji code, developed in 1998 and released in 1999, automatically transformed Shift-JIS characters (the Japanese equivalent of the ASCII standard with additional support for Japanese characters) into ‘more pictorial’, predesigned representations.:) thus turning into ☺. The original Japanese keitai emoji, 携帯絵文字 (keitai being the term for Japanese mobile phones prior to smartphones), contained 176 of these pictorial characters, which looked much ‘rougher’ than what we now use internationally (see Blagdon 2013). At first, they also could not escape the ‘insularity’ of Japanese mobile phone systems, in part because they had been intentionally designed to display only on DoCoMo’s proprietary platforms exclusive to phones owned and operated by its Japanese subscribers. It was not earlier than on Friday, February 6, 2009, that the California-based Unicode Consortium—a nonprofit organization founded in 1991, specifying the international Unicode Standard for digital communication—decided to sanction the global implementation of 674 emoji pictograms. They became available to software developers in 2010 and were consequently ‘re-introduced’ for Japanese customers on global, internet-based smartphones (in Japanese: sumāto fōn or short sumaho) such as Apple’s iPhone one year later. In contrast to many other attempts to create a ‘visual Esperanto’, emoji gained their widespread circulation mainly through their cross-platform, cross-device compatibility, that is, by processes of technological standardization.

Much has since been written on the various linguistic functions of emot-icons, kaomoji, and emoji. In interaction with a text, emoticons intensify, neutralize, or weaken the content and interpret it, for example, in terms of irony; they lend written texts a certain ‘tone’. While emoticons in digital written communication primarily express moods or emotional states (such as joy, sadness, anger, satisfaction, or anxiety), emoji can also depict animals, food, plants, sports, clothes, transport, weather conditions, and so forth. Furthermore, they serve as important markers of interpersonal relationships and social contexts. Luke Stark and Kate Crawford, in a groundbreaking article that considered emoji in their wider cultural context of media ecologies and economies, gave the following assessment:

An emoji, like emoticons or kaomoji, straddles the conceptual line between ideogram and pictogram. Ideograms are symbolic representations of a particular concept or idea; pictograms are ideograms that show a pictorial image of the object being represented. To a greater degree than the emoticon, the utility of an emoji lies in the indeterminacy of its pictographic versus iconographic legibility as a signifier of affect, emotion, or sociality. […] Emoji use is heavily structured by linguistic and social contexts, and by both cultural and personal conventions.

(Stark and Crawford 2015, 5)

Some emoji, even those originally from Japan, are now used and understood in a similar way in ‘Western’ contexts or even transculturally, while others are difficult to understand without previous cultural knowledge. The sociocultural and political dimensions of emoji have become a particularly striking topic of discussion in recent years. This is not only a question of institutional and corporate power. We have to keep in mind that in 2018, 8 of the 12 full members of the Unicode Consortium, the inevitable gatekeepers within the “Byzantine process of emoji selection” (Evans 2017, 30), consist of American companies. They each pay $18,000 a year for their full membership rights (see Berard 2018). In this context, the heated debates on the implementation of different emoji skin-tone colors before they were introduced with the launch of Unicode 8 in 2015, should also be mentioned. Shortly afterward, in March 2016, Amy Butcher’s New York Times opinion piece “Emoji Feminism” pointed out that a disconcerting majority of professional workers within the reservoir of emoji characters were represented as male (see Butcher 2016). Later that year, the consortium followed Google in implementing female versions for their emoji. This could not entirely escape critical questions as to whether the ‘femaleness’ was mainly highlighted by stereotypical features whereas male versions seem more unmarked and ‘neutral’ and are thus still the implicit standard. Other domains of these “cultural struggles, simmering behind the seemingly innocent facades of colorful pictures”, as the linguist Anatol Stefanowitsch called them (2017, n.pag.; translation E.G./L.W.), are even more obvious: trans activists have been petitioning to see the trans flag incorporated into Unicode. When this did not happen, they issued a call to ‘highjack’ the ‘lobster’ emoji as an unofficial symbol (see Young 2018). In their introduction to a recent special issue of First Monday on “Emoji Epistemology”, the editors Crystal Abidin and Joel Gn point out that “emoji culture is becoming a placeholder for people to distil their identities and politics into distinctive—but at times, reductive—icons” (2018, n.pag.). It is obvious that representation matters, in the realm of digital pictograms and ideograms, as much as in any other domain of contemporary communication. If one keeps in mind that up to 90% of all people online seem to use emoji nowadays, their political implications are far from negligible (see Thompson 2016).

To Stark and Crawford, emoji can thus be thought of as ‘signifiers of affective meaning’ doing ‘emojional labor’ within our economies of attention and affect (see also Hardt 1999). They argue that

emoji characters both embody and represent the tension between affect as human potential, and as a productive force that capital continually seeks to harness through the management of everyday bio-politics. Emoji are instances of a contest between the creative power of affective labor and its limits within a digital realm in the thrall of market logic.

(Stark and Crawford 2015, 5; see also Gregg and Seigworth 2010; Goldberg 2012; Papach...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• 1 Emoticons, Kaomoji, and Emoji: The Transformation of Communication in the Digital Age
• PART I Intercultural Mediations
• 2 Not Everyone 💩s: Or, the Question of Emoji as ‘Universal’ Expression
• 3 Cultural Literacy in the Empire of Emoji Signs: Who Is 😂?
• 4 Emoticons: Digital Lingua Franca or a Culture-Specific Product Leading to Misunderstandings?
• PART II Intersectional Mediations
• 5 ‘Impact taisetsu da!’: The Use of Emoji and Kaomoji in Dansō Escort Blogs Between Gender Expression and Emotional Labor
• 6 Emoticons in Social Media: The Case of Japanese Facebook Users
• PART III Linguistic Mediations
• 7 ‘Iconographetic Communication’ in Digital Media: Emoji in WhatsApp, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook—From a Linguistic Perspective
• 8 A Cultural Exploration of the Use of Kaomoji, Emoji, and Kigō in Japanese Blog-Post Narratives
• PART IV Pictorial Mediations
• 9 The Elephant in the Room of Emoji Research: Or, Pictoriality, to what Extent?
• 10 Construction of Iconicity in Scenes of Kaomoji
• PART V Material Mediations
• 11 Who Is Afraid of Mr. Yuk? The Display of the Basic Emotion of Disgust in an ‘Analogue Precursor’ to Contemporary Emoji
• 12 From Digital to Analog: Kaomoji on the Votive Tablets of an Anime Pilgrimage
• Index