An Emoji Story

Reflection

At the beginning of this task, I took some time to reflect on the shows and movies I’ve seen recently, as well as the books I’ve read. I was careful to select something that would be easy enough to simplify, but that also had elements that are more identifiable and a plot that was not terribly redundant. I will admit that I spent some time last night watching some trash television; Netflix’s Too Hot Too Handle (2022). When I reflected on how easy or challenging it would be to translate the story, I realized that the extent of the plot is: ????????????♻. I decided to go with something a little more complex, but realize that this plot is sadly one that is not unique and could be one of many hundreds of TV episodes, however, still  possible to identify through careful examination of the title so I found it important to start there. 

Overall, I found this task to be fun and challenging as well as a great way to illustrate Bolter (2001) and Kress’s (2005) conclusions that hypertext presents a move away from more linear forms of text, such as print. Although the plot of the television show I was attempting to recount is linear, I find that the translation to hypertext does make the text less so, and provides the reader opportunity to explore the text by going forward and backwards to confirm suspicions as to what is taking place in the story. I myself moved emojis forward and backwards in their place in the story, reconsidered which variations of emojis worked best, and found that oftentimes the plot turned out to be flexible and could be presented in many different ways. 

Translating the story into hypertext certainly challenged me to make new connections and meanings in the story that I may have originally overlooked when I first watched this episode last night. When choosing from a limited selection of emoji’s to express the plot, I found myself needing to think about the next closest thing to what I was trying to represent, and reflect on whether or not others reading the story would be able to make those same connections. Although I did not think about it while completing the task, it was done primarily through the analysis and selection of emojis that represented the people, places and things in the story, as well as emotion as an important focus in the story. This also happens to be the way that the emoji keyboard is organized (people, places, things, symbols etc.), which would lead me to conclude that nouns are most easily identifiable in hypertext, helping readers with interpretation of what they are seeing more than a verb or adjective might. For example, I used a police officer and police cruiser to represent a pursuit, rather than any emojis that represent the action of pursuit but still feel that the message comes across.

I am hoping that if you had the chance to read my emoji story you are able to accurately interpret the plot. Does anyone have a good guess for the title? Hint: it’s a new release on Netflix.

Let me know in the comments! 

References 

Bennett, C. (2022, December 7). Too Hot Too Handle. whole, Netflix. 

Bolter, J. D. (2001). Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print (2nd ed.). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Kress, G. (2005), Gains and losses: New forms of texts, knowledge, and learning. Computers and Composition, 2(1), 5-22.