Hi Richard,
No worries. Everybody will be able to keep using personal emojis and the ones on forums like this.
More relevant to this site: Someone could write a tune called "Accordion Emoji," and play it as the thing appears on people's phones all over the world.
Long winded: There is an international computer industry group with the great name "The Unicode Consortium" that makes standards so that computers can show roughly the same characters when you type in your phone or another brand of computer or wherever. They've been doing that for years without anybody noticing.
In the last decades they've been approving a growing list of standard emoji characters, so a cellphone in one place will show something similar as a computer. Every year they approve some more. There's a banjo emoji on the new phones—the gauntlet had been thrown. Different companies (computer or phone makers) let people use these standard emojis. I just tried some of the "standard" emojis here and they didn't work. So there goes international standards
. But they'll work in many places.
Short winded: Nothing will change, but millions (billions?) of people will be able to add little accordions to their text messages or whatever. Even my kids! It's silly, but was a fun project while I was waiting for copy-edits on my accordion history book.
Now I'm curious how the emojis work on this forum. I think they're an earlier system based on the smilies like :) that people have used for years. The Unicode emojis are sort of an upgrade on that system to add many more.
For those interested in further boring "emoji theory" I just searched for "emoji history" and got a screenful of articles to peruse.
I could start here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EmoticonAnd then go here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EmojiBut instead I'm going to go eat dinner with my fam in the real world.