Beyond Voice: Communication Reinvented Behind Glass

Whether you’re sharing your baby’s first steps on FaceTime or collaborating with your business partner on WhatsApp, it’s impossible to deny that technology has changed the way we communicate.

COMMUNICATION REINVENTED

Emoji are part of our vocabulary, paying our share of the bill on iMessage is the norm, and augmented reality helps make everyday messages more fun. This week, we explore how our iPhones have transformed the way we speak, look at the immense power of the Chinese messaging app WeChat, and consider where we’re headed in the future…

THE RISE OF EMOJI

It’s hard to imagine what life was like before we had emoji on our phones. Those grinning yellow faces have become part of our everyday lives - and whether you’re a fan of them or not, they’re hard to avoid. More than five billion of them are sent via Facebook Messenger every day, they were the subject of a movie that generated more than $200 million at the Box Office, and one emoji - the crying with laughter face - was controversially named the Oxford English Dictionary’s Word of the Year back in 2015. In short, emoji are everywhere, and today they’re as much a part of our culture as the iPhone.

Along with social media, emoji have become so ensconced in our day-to-day lives that they have transformed the way we communicate. Indeed, when we ‘talk’ online, we now prefer to use emoji to offer social clues, rather than typing. It has always been hard to infer the user’s emotions when communicating via our smartphones or computers, but with emoji, it’s possible to add depth, expression, and creativity to our conversations and digital persona.