I chose to look at Laura’s post in contrast to my own for the Emoji task of Week 6 as the next contribution to my linking assignment. Her blog space, like mine, is hosted on WordPress although the different themes that we have employed create very different experiences in how we engage with our individual posts. The layout on Laura’s blog space is perhaps less clinical than my own with a colorful background and a logo with her name displayed brightly in this space. This has eloquently infused a sense of her personality into the space where my own can be regarded as more minimalist. I have made less use of the architectural elements available in WordPress to give readers of my blog a sense of my character. This results in the reader having to rely solely on the contents of my posts to infer more of my personality.

There are also two main ways to navigate Laura’s blog with a vertical menu on the left hand side allowing one to navigate to her different weekly tasks. On the right hand side, she again has a vertical menu, which links to her author bio and last activity according to the date posted. In contrast, the menu to be used to access the different subsections of tasks in my space runs horizontally at the top of the blog and the main page has to be used to look at chronologically posted submissions. The layouts of our different blog spaces does affect the readability of posts though as Laura’s text is spaced more compressed between the two menus and mine appears less restricted. I regard it as a bit of a trade-off between more functionally and freedom of movement in the space versus a less constricted reading experience. I like both formats and didn’t have any trouble reading Laura’s post, it was only when returning to my own post that I picked up on this subtle difference in experience.

In focusing on the contents of the weekly task, although deciphering the title and plot of the show Laura focused on unraveling using emojis was beyond me, I was very drawn into her description of how she went about completing this task. She went into detail on how she approached conveying the title and plot i.e. her choice to mostly convey ideas rather than individual syllables and like her, I also had to compromise on how I wanted to represent my plot based on the number of emojis available to me. We also both started by illustrating the title of the story which seems a natural inclination given the influence of the written word in our daily lives (a book starts with its title followed by the story).

However, what really piqued my interest in her post was the mention of the other two stories she wanted to explore but was unable to because of the lack of available emojis. No Egyptian related emojis could be found apart from the Egyptian flag nor was there an emoji for the Eiffel tower in the library of emojis out there. I was almost in disbelief that these emojis would be unavailable among the 3 304 Unicode Standard pictographs in existence. This made me pause to reflect and consider how representative emojis truly are and whether this was important.

First created in the 1990’s in Japan, the most recent set of emojis added to the library came after a proposal from Apple to include more options regarding accessibility emojis. Was there a need for more emojis though? Well, simply put- these pictographs (pictorial symbols) have come a long way from their first use in adding tone to text based digital messages. According to the Washington Post, cultural experts have even posited that “representation by emoji validates identity”. Since emojis are thought to be used by 92% of the global population online, representation then becomes a truly important aspect to ensure people can authentically express themselves.

I randomly found a Statue of Liberty emoji and a Moai (Easter Island Head statues) emoji on my keyboard but hardly any other emoji that could be linked to a specific country or cultural group (apart from country flags). As we keep expanding the library of emojis, I think it will be important to bring in representation of these facets associated with human culture if we want to ensure everyone has an equal opportunity to represent themselves using these symbols.

References

Baca, M. C. (2019, July 18). Why emoji are — finally — becoming more diverse. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/07/18/why-emoji-are-finally-becoming-more-diverse/