This is one of my favorite tasks, as I am passionate about challenges, solving problems and critical thinking. So for my third linking assignment I went on a scavenger hunt on the emoji stories of my peers. I didn’t grow up in Canada, and sometimes I do feel the disconnect with some references to media or songs. I wanted to know how many I recognize and how many I would be lost, especially since picture writing is constructed culturally (Bolter, 2001).
So for my scavenger hunt I started with Chelan, as she is the first one listed in the workspaces. I thought that it would take me a while to find a story that I would get, and to my surprise, Chelan’s story I got right away, there was no challenge in this one. It was definitely the Lion King.
Chelan explains that she was struggling to think of a recent movie, and decided to rely on her memory of a classic. I guess since the Lion King is a classic, the cultural constraints didn’t affect identifying the movie. As I looked through her story I started to noticed that although I know the story really well, since I have two young kids, there were parts that I took me awhile to understand some of the emojis she chose, I wondered then if it was because picture writing is constructed culturally (Bolter, 2001). I still don’t get why there is a tiger in the story, especially after Mufasa dies? Does she mean a tiger is similar to a lion’s cub? Is this Simba?
Just like Chelan, I also chose to represent a story that is a classic, “Finding Nemo”. Although a classic as well, it was a challenge to create the story as there is no clown fish emoji, I actually didn’t notice until I had to look for one for this activity. What gives Chelan’s story away are the emojis available of a lion and a crown, it’s almost a literal translation. I think that if there was a clown fish emoji, my story would have been just as easy to guess as Chelan’s.
Chelan mentioned that she struggled with not having the ability to demonstrate female/male and the passing of time. For the passage of time I found it very clever how she used a series of emojis that show the earth from day to night. For the female challenge she decided to use a bathroom symbol to indicate that Simba met a female lion who he felt in love with. The bathroom symbol was the most interesting to me, as we have learned that a specific female and male stick figure represents the bathroom, but in reality they just indicate a binary set of gender which is culturally constructed as the symbol for bathroom. I wonder if as society evolves in terms of moving away from a binary set of gender, if the bathroom symbol should evolve. Perhaps the image of a toilet, would be more representative of what the space is for, and not who is using that space.
References
Bolter, J. D. (2001). The breakout of the visual. In Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print (2nd ed.). Mahwah, N.J: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
