The Allusionist Podcast of Radiotopia Network did a pretty decent episode about Emoji, if you want to check it out, you can find that here Helen Zatlzman makes a lot of good points here better than I could, but just some ideas from the episode (with a few additional links of my own added in)
One of my personal favorite observations is how emoji is simply a byproduct of Japanese mobile webculture, known as keitai culture. Currently, smartphones in Japan have about 44% market penetration. While this may seem like a lot, compare that to 75% market penetration in the US. If you watch any significant amount of anime, you may notice that characters often have flip phones. which seems odd in the post smartphone world. Looking back pre-smartphone, when we were struggling with our T9 Nokia's (not even Motorola Razr's yet), Japan already had a thriving mobile web industry and culture, which hasn't really ever gone away. This was even before the rise of personal computers in Japan. This is also partially helped by the more advanced cellular network in Japan and Part of this was the technology boom in Japan at the time, but also part of it is the inherent form of language between the east and the west. Whereas here in the West, we require multiple characters to equal a single word, in Japan it is possible to have one character equal one more, leading to more information density overall. If you look at the origin of a lot of kanji, they have their origins in pictographs (for example, the kanji for tree looking like a tree, and the kanji for forest looking like three kanji for tree squished together in the space of one character), this matches up fairly well with the idea of emoji as a whole - conveying some idea in a single character. So it makes sense to me that emoji come from Japan. One side effect too is that certain emoji are based in Japanese symbology - the "Person with Hands on Head" emoji actually corresponds to the Japanese symbol maru, which is used to indicate correct Source.
Other side effects of Japanese mobile web culture:
Also I'm kind of disappointed I wasn't able to write this all out in emoji, and I really hope that someone does at some point this week make a comment response that is all emoji, if only to hear Mike respond in kind
https://www.amazon.com/YOLO-Juliet-OMG-Shakespeare-William/dp/0553535390
It's a retelling of Romeo and Juliet with emojis and text lingo
It's so bad...it made me hate life for a while
No, since each character in Mandarin is a logograph that still represents a spoken word—if you know even just a little about Mandarin as a spoken language, you can still read those logographs and repeat what the writer said word-for-word. This is different from proto-writing, where characters tend to be symbols so you don't have to know something about a spoken language in order to use them.
I think a better example would be writing Shakespeare using emojis (yes, it's a thing) or telling a love story using emoticons.
YOLO Juliet (OMG Shakespeare)
https://www.amazon.com/YOLO-Juliet-OMG-Shakespeare-William/dp/0553535390
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You say that as if this doesn't exist.
It could be worse, I mean, it could be OMG Shakespeare.