Emoji Explosion: Research the Past To Predict the Future

With 72 new emoji's (or is it emoticons?) set to be released to a hungry public, the question now becomes, what other emoji's would we like to see?

Will bacon and avocado emoji's be enough to satiate the public's appetite? Probably not. The reason is the following: emoji's have begun to replace words, and we'll need a lot more than 72 to fill our desires. Communication between humans has evolved tremendously over the years (or devolved, depending on your interpretation). What began as a long form correspondence between two people has now turned into an emoticon-packed back and forth screen share.

In terms of the future of emoji's and where it is going, we need to take a look at how we got here, and where it all began:

• Writing letters in the mail

• Sending postcards

• Sending emails & online cards

• Text messages (SMS)

• WhatsApp & Facebook Messenger

Sending a letter in the mail – when was the last time anyone did that? And no, I'm not referring to a government form. I'm referring to a handwritten letter from one person to another. This lost art was the primary method of conversing with others, even after the telephone was invented. (And it's not dying either – last year there were over 150 billion pieces of mail sent out!). For the most part, however, writing letters soon shifted toward postcards, which became a sort of faster, haphazard way to communicate with people. And, once email was invented, people suddenly found a new and fast, postcard-like way to communicate.

In terms of communication breadth, the jump from mail to online was quite striking, as people could no longer write or draw in free form. Whatever was found on the keyboard is what was allowed in an email. (That's the QWERTY keyboard that we're talking about). Sure, there were eCards, which allowed for much more freedom of expression, but in terms of fast communication, email became the mail du jour. (Though it had quite a head start: 1978 to be exact).

As email shifted to mobile, we saw an advance in phones and messaging capability. Early SMS allowed for basic faces like :) and :(. But it wasn't until WhatsApp that we saw the current explosion of emoji's. And the new explosion is certainly interesting.

With the evolution of communication arriving to the point that words are being replaced by tiny bite sized images that can be sent with one press of a button (not including the send button), it's time that we simply receive emoji's for every single noun.

Yep – why stop at bacon and avocado? Because emoji's have essentially replaced words, to a degree, we'll need emoji's for everything.

That is why I propose creating emoji's for every noun. Now, before we start creating thousands of emoji's, let's point out that there are many nouns which are unusable. Nouns such as history and information probably won't cut it in the world of emoji's. If we sharpen our focus on 'common nouns', we can probably limit that to 1000. Here is a hefty list of nouns as a good start.

Of course, Unicode gives a set of rules for how to determine what can become an emoticon. The two most important factors listed are totally achievable:

• Frequency

  • This is the most important factor for inclusion, after compatibility.

  • There should be high expected usage worldwide, or high expected usage within a particular community of users

• Multiple usages

  • Does the candidate emoji have notable metaphorical references or symbolism?​

The point is, we might as well ponder the root cause: people are using emoticons more than words. This means that that instead of incrementally adding 72 emoji's at a time, we might as well dump 1000 at a time, in an effort to satiate everyone's needs. And while avocados and bacon are filling, they won't do enough to satiate the emoji community.