Emoji – the Digital Age Glyphe

Abstract The “global village” predicted by Marshall McLuhan referred among others, to the individual’s sense of intimate belonging to a planetary collective identity. Compared to the informational content of writing on social media, the emotional component has at least the same importance, which is why completing the text with suggestive icons has become more than a trend. The transition from emoticon to kaomoji and then to emoji captures an important evolution in terms of the individual’s identity in online media. The widening of the iconic register with objective and corporeal details indicates an articulation of the hybrid language with a reminiscent figurative morphology of ancient glyphs. Further on, bitmoji foresees the need for individual identity in the virtual world of Metaverse, where the NFT avatar will represent, most likely, the unique and idealized version of the user.