Did you rely more on syllables, words, ideas or a combination of all of them?

 For this task of using electronic picture writing to communicate a plot to a movie I watched, I decided to rely on a combination of syllables, words, and ideas and this, for me, was a challenging task. I believe Bolter (2001) refers to this task as hypermedia. As I mentioned initially, it was challenging to pick the emojis to tell the plot as I had to write my thoughts out. Still, it got easier as I selected the images that represented each sentence’s idea. However, it became more manageable to create this picture writing because the emojis made me edit my sentences using fewer words, which made my sentences more precise. Some might refer to my sentences as very simple. For example, my original sentence went like this “an intelligence officer in the Secret Intelligence Service fell in love with a doctor.” It was selecting the emoji that changed my sentence to “man loves a woman doctor.” According to Bolter (2001), “hypermedia claims that it can communicate more effectively or more vividly with the user by embedding these elements in an interactive text” (p.64). However, using words and ideas is the best way to communicate since not all terms can be found using emojis, so I hope to convey some of the plot’s ideas. Therefore, readers may not understand the message’s true meaning because emoji imagery can have “a broad range of verbal meanings: each element means too much rather than too little” (Bolter, 2001, p. 59). With that said, the reader may find reading my plot challenging to understand what I attempted to communicate because “picture writing lacks the narrative powers by the standards of phonetic writing” (Bolter, 2001, p. 59).

Did you start with the title? Why? Why not?

Using this multimodal approach in communicating my movie plot, I decided to start with the title for two main reasons. One purpose was to use it as a practice exercise to ensure I could use emojis to convey my message.  I intended to communicate a clear picture writing for the reader. Keeping that in mind, I can confidently say that North American readers would be familiar with the emojis I used. Therefore they would be more successful in grasping the plot. However, these emojis are also associated with one’s culture; hence, my electronic picture writing may have limitations in their ability to convey my communication (Kress, 2004, p. 5). My second reason is that if I do an excellent job at communicating the title using emojis, then it would assist the reader in understanding the plot of the story.

Did you choose the work based on how easy would it be to visualize?

You would think that one would consider a particular film because its title would be easy to visualize. However, this was not my reason.  I enjoyed this movie.  I had not gone out to the movie theatre in a long time due to the lockdown, and I was pleasantly surprised when I did that; for one, I did not fall asleep, and two, I was able to stay seated and total length of the movie which was two hours and 43 minutes.  When reflecting on using only emojis as a form of communication, would this indicate how the public communicates (Kress, 2004, p. 5)? As well as culturally, is this the valued mode of commutation (Kress, 2004, p. 5)?

Answer to the movie I was trying to describe click here

References

Bolter, Jay David. (2001). Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print [2nd edition]. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Kress, G. (2005). Gains and losses: New forms of texts, knowledge, and learning. Computers and Composition, 22(1), 5-22. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compcom.2004.12.004