Hint: It is a movie and a show.
In reading Bolter (2001), I struggled to accept the proposed hierarchy of communication modes between visual, oral, and written. Bolter states that, “If alphabetic writing is regarded as secondary writing, in the sense that it refers the reader to another system (spoken language), picture writing seems to be primary” (Bolter, 2001). What is missing is context. The nature of the message defines which mode is supreme. Our task here is to encode a visual experience with symbolic text and so the visual is primary and the text is secondary. If the task was to describe an emotion or a line of thinking, then perhaps text becomes primary because we often think in words. Whichever mode of communication is more true to nature, or more transparent to the true nature (Bolter, 2001), depends on what the nature is. Then there is the problem of bias. There are slight differences in how each person receives and interprets oral, visual, and written language due to differences in lived experience. Kress (2005) describes reading as an act to fill symbols with meaning, and what that meaning is depends on the reader. To truly preserve the nature of a message, a preservation that will never actually reach 100% I might add, all three communication modes need to be employed to build in redundancies. If the receiver interprets a sound incorrectly, there is a backup subtitle and visual. If we think about it, all experiences are multisensory. It is inherently impossible to capture the true nature by only speaking to one sense, be it a visual, auditory, or written text.
To describe the plot of my chosen show, I relied on words and ideas. A glance of the available symbols revealed that there were not enough symbols to cover all of the syllabic sounds in the English language, which meant that this system alone would be insufficient in communicating the plot. If I were to use syllables at one place and then ideas/words in another, how would the reader know when to read in syllables and when to read in ideas? I would have to set up explicit methods and instructions for the reader so that there is no ambiguity in where to use each decoding method. There is a great advantage in not using emojis as syllables at all, and that is that by doing so, the emoji language becomes more global; readers in languages other than English will have a better chance of understanding. Of course, some symbols may still be interpreted incorrectly due to, again, differences in lived experience, and in particular, cultural differences. For example, if I had to code for “person in mourning” for a Western audience, I’d choose people symbols in black attire. However, if I had to code for the same thing for a Chinese audience, I’d choose people symbols in white attire.
There is a lot of remediation (Bolter, 2001) in my emoji story. My emojis are arranged from left to right as Western text is, and is to be read from top to bottom. I decided on this feature so that reading these emojis bear some sense of familiarity to reading text. As reading and writing is so dominant in our culture, I expect readers to fall into this subconscious behaviour automatically. My audience is fellow ETEC 540 students, who are studying writing and are reading papers every night from left to right. When reading anything, be it visual or textual, we hunt for a starting point. We understand and learn things in chronological order because we experience things embedded in time. This was clear to me as I tried, unsuccessfully, to read the visual by Shahash’king in Bolter (2001). By laying my emojis left to right, top to bottom, I answer the proverbial question, “And then what happened?” and mimic the authoritative book, which is the epitome of organized thought (Kress, 2005). I immediately identified another problem in communicating my plot. If there are no periods, how does the reader know where one idea begins and ends? How will the reader know to which emoji noun an emoji adjective is applied? To address this, I broke my ideas into separate lines because to go from one line to the next, the reader must go through a cognitive pause. I realize that my concerns and fixation over “emoji grammar” stem from my refusal to go 100% visual and symbolic, and 0% text. I am so fixated on reading and writing text that I am convinced that others will be too. I do note that I struggled to maintain the left-to-right read by the time I got to the last three lines of my plot. Due to a lack of prepositions, I had to resort to using a more visual method to communicate the place where certain events took place. Stepping back, I think I borrowed syntax from math, where a line of operations in parentheses are taken to be grouped together (3+4+5).
I started with the title because it was the simplest thing to transcribe into emojis, and the title convinced me that my chosen show was a viable option for this task. This task would be near impossible if the chosen show was predominantly focused on abstract themes. What would be an appropriate emoji for concepts like dignity, pride, personal growth, as an example? How would I transcribe “Pride and Prejudice”? The more concrete the plot, the easier it is to transcribe into emojis because there are not universal symbols for complex feelings, but there are for concrete objects and simple themes.
After completing my emoji transcription, I thought about how rigid my creation was. This task was to be posted on a digital space, not on a page of a book. I started to envision a design for emoji grammar. Every noun can be a hyperlinked emoji, which upon clicking or hovering, reveals an adjective emoji. A verb emoji can be coded for movement to emphasize the action. Gif emojis would be perfect for this task. Upon further thought, is the rigidity of my emoji story such a bad thing? The goal is to successfully communicate a show to others, so an authoritative approach, where I control how the reader experiences this task, seems appropriate. If too much freedom is given to the reader to explore, chronological order becomes fuzzy and the plot might be lost. And so, moving forward, I might look at a publication’s topography to understand its purpose. Is it to convince, to pass knowledge, to teach, or is it to allow for personal development and entertainment?
Bolter, J. D. (2001). Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print (2nd ed.). Mahwah, N.J: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. doi:10.4324/9781410600110
Kress (2005), Gains and losses: New forms of texts, knowledge, and learning. Computers and Composition, Vol. 2(1), 5-22.