Headline January 12, 2017/ ''' STUDENTS -*SMOKY*- SMILEYS '''

''' STUDENTS -*SMOKY*- SMILEYS '''

FROM A HUMBLE SMILEY FACE with a box mouth and inverted V's for eyes, crude weather symbols, and a rudimentary heart-

*Emoji have now exploded into the world's fastest growing language*.

And from my  *Bleeding Hearts*  over all these many years, I kept pleading and pushing many a student from this proud country, Pakistan,  to take my help and master this great emoji art for !WOW!, none did. 

Dee, true on that? Am I?  

So, a beautiful verse, with slight true changes, from this genius American Poet Edna St Vincent Millay,  the first woman to win the Pulitzer  for verse-

*And in the most loving memory of my uneducated and beloved mother, Punjabi Poet Lady Ashrafat Jan,  I share with you all*    

You sit before the History and Heat-

Rendering the heavy air too deadly, yet sweet.

Drawing your  *puff and powder*  from thy case,

Dusting with pollen, your small serious face.*

And then, from Anon:

Yee render not, what broken humanity really needs-

In thy small minuscule world that surly humans creep.

In what wonder light, shall the Lord's smiley  -sway the freeze,

Come beloved, no flower of fragrance, can we all, ever reap. 

There are now about  1,800  emoji characters   -and counting. They cover everything from emotions and food to professions, are racially diverse and have become an integral part of the  *smartphone age*.

The digital hieroglyphics are regarded so significant that New York's Museum of Modern Art  [MOMA] , which is home to works by Andy Warhol and Pablo Picasso, is exhibiting the original 170 designs.

*Shigetaka Kurita*, the  man who created these characters, says he was meeting an obvious need:

''It wasn't only Japanese who felt inconvenient when they were exchanging text messages. We were all feeling the same thing.'' he tells AFP.

Kurita was working at major  telecom NTT Docomo in 1999, when he sketched out one of the first emoji, a clunky looking thing barely recognizable as the precursor of today's  yellow smiley face.

Kurita was also experimenting with how to make information, such as weather forecasts, more accessible on the small screens of emerging cellphones, deciding visual aids would help.

For inspiration, Kurita says he tapped into Japan's popular manga comics and the country's complicated writing system that uses two sets of phonetic letters mixed with Chinese characters, known as Kanji.

Keenly aware of how text messages could be misconstrued, he wanted to create visual accompaniments to help articulate tone. 

''With a heart, the message can't be negative whatever the text says,'' Kurita explains, describing the motivation to include the sign.

Despite being popular in Japan around the turn of the century, it took another decade for emoji to take off globally.

Their success is in part due to the soaring popularity of smartphones, which has resulted in a jump in mobile messaging.

Around 2010, a consortium of tech firms adopted standardised table so emoji could be used across different platforms.

Subsequently they became available on iPhone, and there was no turning back, ever.

They are found in every type of online communication, whether it;s tennis star Roger Federer using them to announce his comeback from an injury, or Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop sending an angry red face to describe Russia's Vladmir Putin.

Reality star Kim Kardashian, who has  88,9 million followers on Instagram alone, developed her own range of  'Kimoji"  symbols. There are also apps for users to create their own, personalised emoji avatars.

It is estimated emojis are used by 92% of the  'online population', according to the 2015 Emoji report, released by the digital marketing firm. In the same period Oxford Dictionary chose an emoji as its word  of the year.

Recently, a  London translation agency said it was advertising for the first ''emoji translator''  to help meet the  ''challenges posed by the world's fastest growing language''.

''We have turned a corner in writing, whereby phonetic script and visual symbols are being integrated more and more,'' said University of Toronto anthropology professor Marcel Danesi, author of  *Visual Language in the Age of the Internet*.

In some ways,  {emoji}  have rendered communications much more fluid and effective.''

*Last month, Kurita went to New York to visit the MOMA exhibition honouring his creation*.

Kurita wonders what  emoji  will look like in  50 or 100 years. ''I don't think they will disappear  -and a heart symbol will always be heart  -but I wonder how others will turn out.'' he said.

Kurita, now a board member at Internet services firm Dwango, didn't get direct financial rewards for his creation.

''But it's more than enough compensation to have the honour of them being added to MOMA's collections and going down in history: 

!!

With respectful dedication to the Students, Professors and Teachers of the world. See Ya all on !WOW!  -the World Students Society and.......Twitter-!E-WOW!  -the Ecosystem 2011:

''' The !WOW! Touch '''

Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless