The world is flooded with bizarre days to celebrate. However, today is a day that is quite significant if you communicate in the digital space. July 17 is recognised as World Emoji Day. From crying (😭) over your missed deadlines to rolling on the floor laughing (😂), it is the emojis that lets one express themselves in a far better way. Emojis have truly uplifted the simple-text based conversations and have allowed users to exhibit emotions even through text.
This day was established in 2014 by the founder of Emojipedia, Jeremy Burge. This day was hailed to honour the significance of emojis in everyone’s lives. Reports suggest that the day was originally referred to as the day when Apple premiered their iCal calendar app back in 2002. July 17 was shown on the Apple Colour Emoji version of the calendar emoji (📅) as an Easter egg.
On Android, Gmail, Hangouts, and ChromeOS products in 2016, Google modified the appearance of the Unicode character U+1F4C5 📅 CALENDAR to represent July 17. To minimise misunderstanding on World Emoji Day, all major platforms—aside from Microsoft—had moved by 2020 to display July 17 on this emoji.
Many organisations and agencies, along with users, have taken to Twitter to tweet about the day. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) tweeted about how the refugees are just like us and posted a graphic consisting of emojis of various people, of different colours and professions.
Another Twitter user expressed themselves through emojis while sending out a sweet message.
Then, the official Twitter handle for the Indian Olympic Association (IOA) and Commonwealth Games India (CGI) tweeted the pictures of javelin thrower, Neeraj Chopra, Badminton players Lakshya Sen and Satwiksairaj Rankireddy, and Table Tennis player Sathiyan Gnanasekaran, and asked the users about the emojis those pictures reminded them of.
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Emojis play a significant role by making our conversations more expressive and emotion-laden. This day is to commemorate how our lives have been transformed by the advent of these small symbols that let us effortlessly convey emotions, ideas, and messages. Emojis have given the world their universal language, which lets everyone converse irrespective of the language they speak or the place they belong to.
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