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Social Sci LibreTexts

7.13: Emojis

  • Page ID
    261315
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    An image of the scream emoji.
    Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Scream emoji. (Copyright Keymap9)

    Our common global visual vocabulary has grown exponentially since the speed of communication has increased with use of the Internet and especially the character limits that are necessary for texting and social media posts. With only so many characters allowed for communicating a message, we use pictures in the form of emojis to convey emotional meaning that would otherwise be missing. Emojis were created in and for the digital world, originally appearing in Japanese mobile phones in the late 1990s (Pardes). The term comes from the Japanese words “e” (picture) and “moji” (letter or character), though it coincidentally sounds very much like it has a root word of “emotion” in English.

    The scream emoji shown above directly references the figure in the famous composition The Scream by Edvard Munch (1893, further demonstrating the pervasiveness of our common visual vocabulary.


    7.13: Emojis is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Ellen Carey.

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