Face with Tears of Joy
A Natural History of Emoji
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2.7 • 3 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A vibrant exploration of the world’s newest language—where it came from, how it works, and where it’s going.
We are surrounded by emoji. They appear in politics, movies, drug deals, our sex lives, and more. But emoji’s impact has never been explored in full. In this rollicking tech and pop culture history, Keith Houston follows emoji from its birth in 1990s Japan, traces its Western explosion in the 2000s, and considers emoji’s ever-expanding lexicon. Named for the world’s most popular pictogram, Face with Tears of Joy tells the whole story of emoji for the first time.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Houston (Empire of the Sum) chronicles the rise of the emoji in this fun romp through the evolution of digital language. He begins the account in Japan, where teenagers' widespread use of pagers in the late 1980s led to the coded use of number combinations (888 meant laughter, for example, because the number 8 in Japan can be pronounced "ha"). In the 1990s, engineer Shigetaka Kurita created 176 digital icons to express "complex ideas like love in a single character." These were quickly popularized and named emoji, a portmanteau of the Japanese words for "picture" and "written character." In 2011, Apple became the first major Western company to fully embrace the phenomenon by introducing emoji to the iPhone keyboard, building on the groundwork laid by Google when they expanded into Asia. From there, "emoji went global." Houston skillfully covers the ups and downs of the evolution of emoji, including controversies surrounding their depiction of race and gender, and concludes that the current era is the heyday of emoji, which are currently "diverse enough to be useful but small enough to fit into the average human brain." With a casual approach that suits the content, this is equal parts informative and delightful.
