Task 6: An Emoji Story

While this may be very familiar to a lot of you, the above emojis represent one of my favourite shows that I recently re-watched. I relied mostly on ideas to depict the plot above. The title is hidden in the plot itself, so I did not separate the two. I thought that would make it even easier to identify. I started out with a lot more emojis than I have here, but decided to trim it down to streamline the ideas. I related to Kress’ story regarding the children’s interpretation of their visit to the museum. Kress (2005) mentions how “[t]here is no hint of narration”, rather the children display a variety of objects they found significant (p. 14). The emojis in my “story” above also do not narrate the events of the show, neither did I rely on words or syllables to present it. I thought of the main principles behind the show, the characters, their relationships, their professions as I believe those to be comprehensive enough to describe the whole plot and its premise. I did not choose this because it would be easy to visualize, but I had to challenge myself to focus on the backbone of the show and ignore the trimmings. Kress also distinguishes between words and depictions by stating that while the former is finite and fixed (“syntax, line, page, text”), the latter are more flexible, more meaningful (2005, pp. 15-16). If I were writing out the plot in words, and when I was thinking it out, I was more narrative, chronological, and wanted to include more plot points, storylines and ideas. Trimming this down to the essentials was fun, and I wanted to ensure the meaning would be universally similar. While words are open to interpretation, depictions provide more context and “constitute their own silent language” (Bolter, 2001, p. 59). This language can transcend boundaries of spoken and/or written languages, culture, age. Representing the plot using emojis was also a nice change for me because I am generally quite verbose. Sometimes, the meaning may be lost in too many words. However, with the emojis, or icons, the meaning is visual and limited in interpretation, I think. Could we communicate entirely in emojis, though? Do we lose meaning or something else if we did not use any words? Would my emoji story suffice to present the emotional connect, the mystery and suspense, the pull of the show? I don’t think so…

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References:

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.