Emojis & The Workplace

The last six months, equating to a mass exodus from our offices, cubicles, and study spaces to our homes and spare bedrooms, has brought a plethora of challenges on the information technology front. How to securely work from home became a big question. For some companies and institutions, the transition to remote work is easier than others with different platforms having different quirks and options for deployment on everything from company laptops, to mobile phones and regular home PCs. One common theme among the available platforms is the ability to chat in real-time with colleagues instead of writing an email or placing a call. With chatting comes the inevitable subject of emojis and the role they play in modern workplace communications. But first… 

A Brief History of Emojis 

120 years ago, typewriters were an essential business tool. Sure, secretaries back then were hired based upon how good their handwriting was, and looking back, we can see it as the beginning of the decline of cursive and maybe even the hand-written note. But a typewritten letter on stationary showed that a business had money, at least enough to afford such apparatus. A clerical worker, well trained in typing, can produce volumes of documents faster than writing by hand. Around that same time, folks must have noticed that a colon, a minus sign, and a close-parenthesis looked like a sideways smiley face and thus emoticons were born… 

: - ) 

From those very early days came the renaissance of typography as an art form for the clerical public, as the means and methods for creating such art became more accessible. Technology helped usher that in with its march towards modernity in 1963 with the invention of the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, or ASCII. This standard codified 95 available characters from the English language, and 33 control characters for use on what was known as a Teletype system, something of a daughter of the typewriter and a cousin of the computer keyboard. The ASCII system coded these characters into 7 bits, that is, a combination of seven 1’s and/or 0’s. These characters, intricate for their time, were then combined on screens and paper to form more than just words, and from the hands and minds of clerical professionals, ASCII Art was born. 

("`-''-/").___..--''"`-._ 

`6_ 6  )   `-.  ( ).`-.__.`) 

(_Y_.)'  ._   )  `._ `. ``-..-' 

_..`--'_..-_/  /--'_.' 

((((.-''  ((((.'  (((.-' 

*Go Wildcats *

As Teletype machines morphed into number-crunching computers, the variety and availability of fonts and applications for arranging digital typography exploded. In 1978, ASCII Artists and their sideways smiley faces found a new home in a typeface known as Zapf Dingbats that quickly made its way into a popular computerized font. Sort of like a low-quality emoji, this font took the normal alphanumeric keyboard layout and replaced letters with whimsical iconographic characters. When computers finally started to appear in primary and secondary classrooms in the 1990’s, a newer typeface with many more iconized symbols, Wingdings, was added to a short list of generally available fonts. 

Windings evolved a second, and even a third iteration before the Internet really took off. In 1997, just in time for that Internet take-off, Webdings were born. Like their Wingding predecessors, Webdings are composed of common iconographic symbols, specifically controls. Whereas Wingdings were for Microsoft Windows controls, Webdings were centered around webpage controls. They came about in a transition period between many text-based websites and services switching over to newer graphics-oriented layouts. What users may not have expected was that another standard was about to sneak up and take ASCII’s place, and its name is Unicode. 

Unicode version 1 came out in 1991 and gradually opened digital fonts and typography to what are now 154 national scripts and writing systems. In October 2010, however, with the release of Version 6.0 of the Unicode Standard, we see the first real emoticons, or emoji, in their full-color iconographic glory. Availability wasn’t instant, but after a few years, emojis were part of the standard character offering on most mobile devices. Since then, every major version of Unicode has included more and more emojis for our enjoyment and use in both asynchronous and synchronous communications, including Unicode version 13, which just released in March. 

With that, the question can be asked again, “What is the role of emojis in modern workplace communications, and especially now when an estimated half of the workforce is now working from home?” In the last six months, and necessarily so, virtual communications have moved into the forefront for students, teachers, and all manner of newly minted ‘work-from-home’ professionals. Emojis are time and space saving examples of iconographic characters that can bring a new edge to our sense of style and efficiency in the office and in educational settings. Emojis aren’t just for text messages anymore, since we can’t see our smiles through masks, a well-placed smiley face emoji in an email or a thumbs-up in a chat, can really brighten a colleague’s day.