Face with Tears of Joy: A Natural History of Emoji

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. (July)