The evolution of information and communication for the last 30ish years.

Communication has come a long way from the 1980's when I was born and raised. When I was growing up, pen and pencil with a camouflaged black and white composition book was the primary way to convey your thought on to a canvas. Pen/pencil and paper was the primary way to communicate via snail mail, or a note passed along to another student in class.

Soon thereafter computers started infiltrating our lives slowly but surely. First there were those bulky commodore computers with DOS operating systems. Then there were computers that connected to the internet by a 56k modem that clogged that clogged up the home lan phone line. This paved the way for the birth of AOL and chat rooms, email, and instant messaging (and emojis were born). A short time later phones became portable and now people had the ability to send messages from the palm of their hand (albeit very basic). The emoji sent from the phone was a basic colon with one half of a parenthesis beside it. This basic "brick" phone progressed eventually to flip phones, to different keypad phones to eventually the smartphone. Communication now had the ability to become very colorful, and colorful it became.

Colorful communication. From the keypad of our smartphone, we could now send different emotional faces along with 1000's of other designs from animals, to weather icons, to virtually anything else. Social media is a part of our everyday lives. In a later post, I'll go into more the psychological aspect of why we send certain emojis in certain situations, but for now I just want you to sit back and think about how much emojis and stickers are used in our daily expression.