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King’s are now offering degrees in EMOJIS

Is this really a valuable life skill?


King’s College London has been named one of several universities, along with Edinburgh and Cardiff, to start studying emojis on their courses.

The courses featuring emoji modules include languages, marketing, psychology and politics.

Despite the popular view that the topic is “childish”, the introduction of emojis into an academia has provoked various studies and research in many different fields, because of its cultural significance.

One example of this is due to the lack of representation in the media for the LGBTQA+ community, non-binary emoji figures were issued a month ago.

Dr Philip Seargant, a lecturer at the Open University, has explained that the symbols can reach us about the future of language as well as identity and modern politics.

He said: “Along with memes and Instagram stories, we are definitely seeing a move in this election to a more visual shorthand way of communicating.”

Dr Seargant continued: in the run-up to our General Election of December 12, a number of MPs have been using symbols on social media to attract attention and keep up with the times.

The Conservatives are using the green “tick” symbol to highlight their policies, whilst Labour have been using several emojis as a way of prompting the public to register to vote.

Although emojis first appeared in Japan around 20 years ago and quickly became an integral part of Japanese culture, such as in manga and anime, they have only now been introduced into the academic syllabus.

This is because they were not internationally used until smartphones were released, just under a decade ago, and have since been integrated into our daily communication. There has been a drastic increase of emojis, from 625 in 2010, to 3,178 most recently.

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