Task: Using only emojis available in your texting app (either mobile or desktop), write the title and describe the plot of the last movie, TV or book show that you watched or read.
For example: š„: šŖš (Blade Runner, [movie])
Reflection
I really enjoyed this exercise and it brought up a number of connections for me as I was doing the readings. My strongest connection was the cultural significance of emojis. Bolter said that āalthough the writer and reader may use words to describe and interpret the pictorial message, two readers could exĀplain the same message in different words, and speakers of different lanĀguages could share the same system of picture writing.ā(Bolter, 2001) This brought to mind how differently the same set of emojiās are used and interpreted by disparate cultures around the world, and even different age groups/generations. Even under the influence of globalization, different cultures use the same symbols to mean different things. One example is how āGen Zā uses emojiās differently than millennials do. āThe š, for example, is not just cryingāit is a dramatic subtlety that comes as a reaction out of being overwhelmed by something cute/stupid/funny, in a more humorous way.ā(Sanjay, 2020) versus the original millennial iteration of crying because something was upsetting or sad. Another example is that while the āthumbs-up symbol may be a sign of approval in Western culture, traditionally in Greece and the Middle East it has been interpreted as vulgar and even offensive.ā(Rawlings, 2018) Kress said that āthe technologies of representation and those of communication and/or dissemination are everywhere bound up with the larger, wider changes in the (global) economy, in social and political changes, and in accompanying ethnic and cultural changes.ā(Kress, 2005) It would be interesting to see if someone from another culture would be able to tell what story this is, assuming they were familiar with it to start with.
Did you rely more on syllables, words, ideas or a combination of all of them?
I relied on ideas, and interestingly, I also chose not to use any āhumanā emojis to represent things that were happening to the dog characters. For example, these running emojis šš»āāļøšš¼āāļø paired with this dust cloud šØ are usually used to show movement (to a Western audience), or running towards/away from something. There are a few places I could have used those to show the dogs moving somewhere, but I wanted to avoid mixing the dog and human emojis to avoid confusion for the reader.
Broni states that āemojis do not and cannot by themselves constitute a meaningful code of communication between two parties. Rather, they are used as a way of enhancing texts and social media messages like a kind of additional punctuation.ā(Rawlings, 2018) This tracks with Bolter, who almost twenty years earlier said that āsuch icons [emojis] are meant to put the verbal text in context, as the writer tries to enforce a univocal interpretation on prose that is otherwise open to many interpretations.ā(Bolter, 2001) Keeping these in mind, I did actually spend a good amount of time in my emoji story showing the emotions of the various characters. If you took out all the āemotionā emojis, the story wouldnāt make sense. Iām imposing an emotional interpretation on my audience through the use of emojis that have a highly recognizable emotional meaning tied to them. This was a purposeful choice on my part, to use what I would consider the ābaseā meaning of the emojis. For example, I did not use š or š both of which mean the same thing (laughing), but differ among age groups; š for millennials and š for gen Z and younger.
Did you start with the title? Why? Why not?
I did start with the title because I thought it was so apt to have the lady and the tramp emojis fit so perfectly. If it hadnāt been as easy of a concept to show perhaps I wouldnāt have included it. Bolter said that āpicture writing is perhaps constructed culturally (even today)ā (Bolter, 2001) and I think you can see culture at work here even just within the title. The two dogs both have cultural meanings associated with them, which someone familiar with Western culture would immediately recognize. The white dog is a poodle with a fancy poodle haircut (š©). Poodles are associated with femininity (not always in a good way), prissiness, wealth and a stuck up attitude. The brown dog (š) has weaker cultural associations, perhaps bringing to mind a general mutt breed which are seen as less pretentious, more ādown to earthā but stands well as a foil for the poodle image.
Did you choose the work based on how easy would it be to visualize?
I actually chose it based on the character emojis. I was looking through the emoji choices on my phone and noticed that there were multiple breeds of dog emojis. That is one of the difficulties I had in reading some of my peersā stories; the ācharactersā all look more or less the same. Even though you can change the hair and skin colours on the human emojis, theyāre still too similar to make for easy reading, at least for me.
I did also put some consideration into how to organize the sequences of emojis. I really liked this quote from Kress; āthe temporal and sequential logic of speech, and, leaning on speech, of writing, lends itself to the representation of actions and events in time; hence, the ubiquity of forms of narrative in human cultures; hence also the ubiquity of the event and action oriented uses of speech and writing. The question asked by speech, and by writing, is: āwhat were the salient events and in what (temporal) order did they occur?āā (Kress, 2005) because it made me stop and think about how to order the strings of thought that the emojis represent. I chose to make liberal use of breaks, making sure each āthoughtā was short. I noticed when I read some of my peersā work, that the number of emojis you can use to create a coherent thought is actually quite small before the ideas get lost. There is also something to be said for re-stating certain things to make sure the reader understands the concept youāre trying to express. For example, in the following section:
š©š¤āļø
š©š¤šš
I felt it was worth emphasizing the poodle character's emotional state through a re-stating/repetition to give it more weight since it is a pivotal moment in the story.
In retrospect I also noticed that some of my āsentencesā or strings of thought are meant to be read as a whole, while others string together multiple ideas. For example, š©š¤Ø is meant to be read as one idea (Lady is skeptical), while šØš»š©š¼š±āļøš represents a string of actions taking place in a specific order (the man and woman are shocked, then they call the fire department). This is something I did without conscious intention, perhaps a callback to written-word norms?
References
Bolter, J. D. (2001). Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print.
Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781410600110
Kress, G. (2005). Gains and losses: New forms of texts, knowledge, and learning. Computers
and Composition, 22(1), 5ā22. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compcom.2004.12.004
Rawlings, A. (2018). Why emoji mean different things in different cultures.
different-cultures
Sanjay, S. (2020, October 1). Why Does Gen Z Use Emojis So Weirdly? Vice.
than-millennials
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