Culturally Ostracized Emoji: A Semiotic Analysis of Emojis and Emoticons

The worldwide usage of Emoji is a source to assess the globalization of the Japanese popular culture in the struggle to promote cultural literacy and multiculturalism.  This new visual writing system of Emoji reveals prejudice among its users across the global village. The cultural diversity have made it more complex and unreadable, hence it requires to be used with conventional modes of expression to evade misunderstandings. This rise of Emoji icons was acknowledged in 2015 by Oxford Dictionary by declaring Face with Tear of Joy Emoji as the word of the year. The present research aims to explore the visual practices employed to propagate different ideologies in the culturally banned Emoji icons and Emoticons.  This research is carried out with a proposed semiotic reading of Emoji icons and Emoticons inspired by Marcel Danesi’s the Semiotic of Emoji: The Rise of Visual Language in the Age of Internet