The recent entertainment industry, Angelababy, Deng Chao and Lu Han, the die-hard fans of the three popular artists can be happy, because WeChat will sell the image of the three of them as a WeChat emoticon, paid to provide, six yuan per group. It is said that many true love fans have stayed up late until the early morning of the 21st when their own "love beans" emoji is online, and then the first time to buy. People have to sigh, this is really a world of faces. Good-looking people, doing a few weird looks, can earn a lot.
In addition, there was another thing that went viral on Weibo yesterday: Sony Pictures spent a lot of money (rumored to be seven-figure dollars) to win the Emoji film rights to make an Emoji movie, which will be directed by Anthony Leondis, director of "The Secret of Kung Fu Panda Master".
The above two things seem to be little related, but behind them they all reveal the same message: because of their popularity, they have become high-quality IP and have the value of development.
<h3>Emoji and emoji</h3>
When we use words to communicate, we always feel that there are subtle tones and connotations that are difficult to express. Stimulated by this natural demand, emojis came into being. It's just that emojis first appeared on the web much earlier than we expected. On September 19, 1982, Scott Fahlman pioneered the use of ":-)" and ":-(" on carnegie Mellon University's computer science bulletin board, which is an indiscriminate use of emojis on the Internet. Scott Fahlman became one of the 40 people who changed the Internet.
After this kind of emoji with a concise meaning was transmitted to Japan, it was named "Kaomoji", and the types and forms began to become diverse, and were used on a larger scale on the Internet, which further stimulated everyone's enthusiasm for using emoji.
(From "Tram Man", although this picture has many elements, it is still a typical emoji)
Later, also because of the popularity of emoji in Japan, another more intuitive and figurative expression was invented and first used in the Japanese wireless communication industry, which is emoji, and its other name is more famous - Emoji. In 1998 or 1999, an employee at NTT, Takashi Kurita, inspired by multiple elements of his childhood, created Emoji.
At the beginning of its invention, Emoji was mainly used in wireless communications on the japanese island. In 2009, Apple and SoftBank partnered to bring the iPhone to the Japanese mobile phone market. In this cooperation, SoftBank asked Apple to set up emoji into the phone. An Apple intern produced the first commercial set of Emoji emojis, which had nearly 500 emoticons.
(Pictured is the "Flower Idiot Face" composed of Emoji emoticons, from fastcodesign.com)
Released in October 2010, version 6.0 of Unicode began to include emoji encoding, and Emoji's position in the computer network world began to be officially established, and many non-Japanese mobile phones can also use Emoji.
In 2011, Apple included Emoji in the built-in characters of iOS 5, which laid the foundation for Emoji's worldwide popularity.
The main difference between emoji and emoji is that emoji are facial patterns made by computers with punctuation marks and English characters, or some more complex situation maps; emoji is directly patterns. Therefore, the emoticons we use most of the time belong to emoji.
<h3>From rustic to connotative</h3>
However, as far as China's current netizens are concerned, emoji expressions and emoji expressions seem to be generally called emoticons. However, most people use emoticons that can be divided into emoji emojis, and netizens who like to use emoji are mainly concentrated in the two-dimensional world.
If you survey among Chinese netizens, which is the earliest expression used? Perhaps many of the answers will be QQ's built-in "smiling" emoticons. From the current point of view, this is a simple and unpretentious expression. It will not move, at that time the meaning is simple enough, pure smile to show goodwill, there is no meaning of "huh" now, of course, the connotation of "huh" has also changed.
The number of Internet users and the size of the Internet in China have shown a geometric growth in the decade or so since the emergence of emoticons. Correspondingly, the types and forms of expressions are also quite complicated. For example, after the gif diagram appeared, the originally static expression began to move. After the advent of the WeChat era, the commonly used expressions began to exaggerate, and sometimes in order to strengthen the expressiveness of the expressions, the expressions began to directly add text.
(Yao Ming "laughs")
The network has entered the Web 2.0 era, and the participation of ordinary netizens in many hot network events is getting higher and higher, and the emoticon content of UCG is also more and more timely. Of course, now everyone likes to use these or demonic or connotation or spiritual pollution of the avatar, but also thanks to the "Cosmic Queen", "Fish Pond Owner", "Rampage Comics" and "Asian Expression Three Giants" of the interpretation.
(Director Kim)
In addition to the participation of many users, the efforts of network product providers are also indispensable. For example, Sina Weibo launched the "Horse Riding Dance" emoticon after the popularity of the Divine Comedy "Jiangnan Style"; after Doge became popular on the Internet, the "Doge" and "Meow" emoticons were added, which has now become one of the favorite emoticons of Weibo users, known as a major contribution of Weibo. For another example, the expressions of the three popular artists launched by WeChat this time, even if they are charged, because the three artists have a huge fan base, it can be expected that in the near future, in the WeChat chat of friends, you will often encounter the image of three selling cute dress two.
<h3>New gameplay of emoticons</h3>
The new way to play emoticons, mentioned earlier, as a high-quality IP to shoot movies is a very trench game. Of course, the new gameplay is also very close to the people. Intelligent Environments, a UK company working on banking software, created the world's first password that uses Emoji emoticons entirely. Because the combination of 44 emoticons with 4-digit passwords can reach 3498308. Therefore, the security of the user account is greatly improved.
In addition, as mentioned above, a big reason why emoticons are so popular in online communication is that the amount of information behind emojis is quite large, and emoji even includes symbols that can be corresponded to in real life, and has subtle meanings that words cannot express. As a result, new expressions such as Emoji translators have appeared on the market.
After you enter a word, it will automatically become an emoji expression, such as entering "see", and the input method directly gives an expression of a pair of eyes.
So the question is, what should the following emoji from the New York Times be translated?
1. My phone is running out of battery, do you have a charger?
2. The phone has radiation, unplug it.
3. Save me from work.
4. Great, the old phone is broken, I can change to a new phone.