Image: VICE News Tonight
Three billion people use them. People who do, have more sex and go on more dates.This segment from VICE News Tonight on HBO explores the history of emoji, and how they've become as prolific as texting itself.The Museum of Modern Art recently announced that it is acquiring the set of the original 176 emojis for its permanent collection. Some may question the venerable institution's choice to welcome a mode of expression most used by teenagers over text, but humans have been trying to capture the multitudes emojis contain for centuries.In the 1800s, a French neurologist attempted to build a dictionary of human expression, by electrocuting people and taking snapshots of their faces, which he believed got to the very soul of a person: The Mechanism of Human Physiognomy. Charles Darwin used these to create his own taxonomy of expressions.Emojis as we know them today were born out of necessity and brevity: In 1999, the i-mode mobile internet system only allowed 250 characters at a time. Creator Shigetaka Kurita started with the simple heart emoji, to express what words couldn't. Pagers popular with Japanese youngsters at the time further helped the rise of emoji, and today, there are over 1,800 emoji characters supported through Unicode 9.0."Thirty-nine percent of communication on a regular day is through technology," says Helen Fisher, biological anthropologist at Rutgers University. Emoji are a "brilliant human way" of replacing what we lose when we're no longer picking up the phone to speak to one another."It is no longer used because it is a fad," Kurita says. "It's a standard."Watch the full episode on VICE News Tonight on HBO.
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