Apple about to Release New Emoji for 2017

Bring on the Emoji!

Emojis have become a well-established part of today’s digital culture, so much so that we have a “world emoji day” on July 17 .  What started off as an unofficial celebration of emojis has become a worldwide phenomenon that is typically celebrated with emoji-themed events and product releases. July 17, 2017, saw Apple’s preview of 56 new emojis that are planned to be released later this year.

The 56 new emojis are interpreted from the 69 new symbols approved by the Unicode Consortium this year. The Unicode Consortium is a non-profit organisation that sets the worldwide standard for text characters and emoji. Recent years have seen the number of emojis approved by the Unicode Consortium increase dramatically from 722 in 2015 to 2,666 as of June 2017. Once the characters are approved the software developers such as AAPL and Tech30 for Apple and GOOG for Google will then design versions of these symbols for their respective platforms. This is why the emoji on Android devices tend to look different to those on Apple devices. Emojipedia has created representations of how the new emojis may look .

Image Source: CNET via Twitter

New Emojis for 2017

Amongst the newest batch of emojis are ones that more accurately represent different cultures and ethnicities such as a woman wearing a hijab and a dark-skinned man with a beard. Strangely enough, the eagerly awaited “T-Rex” emoji has been the subject of controversy after the vertebrate palaeontologist Thomas Carr stated that the emoji’s anatomy was “wildly inaccurate”. Thomas Carr pointed out six ways in which the Apple emoji is inaccurate:

1. The shape of the head is wrong
2. The nostrils on a T-Res are closer to the front of the snout
3. The eyes instead of being above the snout should be on the sides of the head
4. The ears on a T-Rex are just above the jawline
5. The bottom teeth on a T-Rex are not visible when its mouth is closed
6. The arms are thinner in the emoji than they would be on a real T-Rex

Would he have felt the need to point out the inaccuracies in the emoji if phone culture was less influential? For example, emojis are being used in advertising such as a billboard for the McDonalds franchise designed around emojis. You can even see emojis being used to advertise TV shows such as Key and Peele on Comedy Central.

Image Source: SocialSecretUK via Twitter

Emojis, Emojis Everywhere!

Thanks to phone culture, emojis are everywhere and 2017 saw the release of the imaginatively titled The Emoji Movie about (you guessed it!) an emoji called Gene who along with his friend Hi-5 travels through the apps in a smartphone trying to find a cure for Gene’s ability to have more than one facial expression which makes him abnormal amongst the other emojis. While the movie received mixed reviews the fact that a movie was made about emojis just goes to show how much a part of our culture they have become. Not surprisingly emoji are also present in many other sectors of entertainment, iGaming for example, where the online slot Chain Reactors on Good Day bingo uses them as symbols on the reels.

Life with Emojis

It is true to say that most of us would feel lost without our smartphone. It has become much more than a way of speaking to people - we use it to write messages and emails, browse the internet, purchase goods, track our finances, take photographs, watch movies, listen to music, read books, navigate the world around us and even track our fitness and health with our smartphones.

We keep our lives on our smartphones and they keep us connected to the rest of the world. It truly is a marvel of the digital age that something so small has become so ingrained in the way we live our lives. Without smartphones and emojis, our conversations would be very different. Emojis are entertaining and add an element of fun to the way we communicate on smartphones and messenger apps as well as breaking down the barriers between different languages and it is quite possible that far from now emojis may be studied in the same way that Egyptian hieroglyphs have been studied and translated.