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Emoji and the Development of Communication

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With forms ranging from written text and pictures to spoken words and videos, several methods of communication have been developed in transmitting or conveying ideas, feelings, and information from an individual to another. The oldest known forms of communication are paintings-such as the ones found in a cave in France-depicting mammoths, horses, lions among other animals (Honour & Fleming, 2005). Then came the petroglyphs and pictograms which, in essence, are drawings that represent objects, events, and activities. Further improvements include the discovery of ideograms. Ideograms are defined as symbols or pictures that are used systematically to represent a concept or an idea. In contrast with petroglyphs, ideograms require the imagination of the writer and the reader to understand what is the idea being conveyed (Albright, 2000). For example, an ideogram depicting two angled lines could be associated with walking, running or speed, depending on the interpretation of the reader based on the whole set of ideograms. A well-known writing system that branched out from ideograms is the Egyptian hieroglyphs, with some characters that represent a letter, a sound or combinations of the two (iMinds, 2009). This point in history marks the start of the modern writing system. Then came the alphabet, which emerged also in Egypt about 4000 years ago (Sacks, 2003). With the use of the alphabet and the modern language that has its own defined words, communication became clearer and easier, making meanings more concrete, as compared to previous forms of writing. The use of written text became a way of having an exchange of thoughts from a person to another or to a group (or the other way around). The use of writing became more and more necessary in conveying instructions especially in the rise of the commercial world by globalization. Similar to that, the earliest mass-produced advertising media is in the form of printed text and picture on paper. The use of conversational writing (with short sentences and informal but accurate words) to engage the customers in reading the advertisement has become a large factor in the enhancement of customer demand for the advertised product (Heaton & McLellan, 2007). Starting with the development of mass printing throug

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