A post from Shady Characters

Emoji, part 8: when is an emoji not an emoji?

This is the tenth in a series of thirteen posts on Emoji (šŸ˜‚). Start at PART 1, continue to PART 11 or view ALL POSTS in the series.


As exuberant as emoji can be in the right hands, our palette of emoji remains tightly controlled by the Unicode Consortium. There are, however, other ways to embed colourful graphics in your digital messages, and, in the long run, there is every possiblity that they may elbow emoji out of the way entirely. The future of emoji may not be emoji at all.


Appropriately, given emojiā€™s invention in Japan, the first cracks in emojiā€™s monopoly on cutesy inline graphics came out of that same country.

In 2011, in the wake of a tsunami that devastated the north-east coast of Japanā€™s main island,1 the countryā€™s telecommunication networks were thrown into disarray. Only the internet, designed from its inception to route data packets around broken network links, continued to function reliably ā€” a fact not lost on NHN Japan, an internet company that chose in June of that year to launch a mobile messaging app based not on fragile SMS text messages but rather fault-tolerant mobile data services. It was called Line and it was a runaway success, hitting 50-million users just a year after launch.2

Though Lineā€™s developers had chosen to use the internet for its robustness, by happy coincidence this also meant that they were not confined to text-only messages. Instead, they could send whatever data they liked. This allowed them to connect users in two notable ways: first, Line users could call one another for free, over the caller and calleeā€™s respective mobile data connections; second, users could embed digital images called ā€œstickersā€ in Lineā€™s SMS-like text messages. These stickers took the form of larger, more detailed versions of existing emoji, along with a slew of additional manga-like characters, that could be sent back and forth either within or in lieu of textual messages.3,4

Lineā€™s stickers were a hit. The app was and is popular in countries whose complex scripts are difficult to enter on smartphones, such as Japan, Thailand, Korea and Taiwan, in part because stickers can convey complex sentiments with a minimum of effort. Moreover, stickers have also turned out to be a formidable revenue stream. In 2013, just two years after its launch, Line made $17 million from sales of downloadable sticker packs;3 two years after that, sticker sales were up to $271 million. This is not to mention that some of Lineā€™s cartoonish sticker personalities, such as ā€œBrownā€ the bear and a rabbit named Cony, have become so popular that they now have their own lines of merchandise worth tens of millions of dollars in their own right.5 (Even in China, where Lineā€™s apps are blocked by that countryā€™s ā€œGreat Firewallā€, knicknacks featuring Cony, Brown and company are sought after.6)


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2 comments on “Emoji, part 8: when is an emoji not an emoji?

  1. Comment posted by Roy Hodges on

    Actually the first emoji was most likely cave paintings and thankfully there was not commentary to obstruct languageā€™s progress. [ insert emoji here ]

    1. Comment posted by Keith Houston on

      Hi Roy – thanks for the comment! But where would we (and by “we” I mean “I”) be without the commentary?

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