Task 6 – An Emoji Story

Reflection

For this task I had to select a recent book, tv show, or movie then write the title and plot using only Emojis . Please see the entry above. In chapter 4 of Bolter’s book, he discusses how the evolution of print technologies have allowed or encouraged humans to move from a linguistic (text) culture into more of a visual (graphic) culture for communication (Bolter, 2001). With the arrival of computers and the web, visual culture has grown even further and has become a dominant form of communication even to this day. In 2021, visual culture is still going strong and continues to grow with the evolution of technology (examples: video chat, holograms, emojis, memojis, VR, gifs, etc.).

One of the most interesting developments in visual communication in the past twenty years has been “Emojis”. According to Grannan (n.d.) from Briticanna.com, Emojis are pictographs of faces, objects, and symbols. They are the successor to the earlier emoticons which were glyphs or icons built in ASCII (a type of character code system) and read sideways (Grannan, n.d.) . Emoticons were used in electronic communication to represent emotions in a more graphical way then from a traditional textual method. When discussing emoticons, Bolter (2001) says, “such icons are meant to put the verbal text in context, as the writer tries to enforce a univocal interpretation on prose that is otherwise open to many interpretations.” (Bolter, 2001, p.72) Early emoticons were able to do some of this and modify traditional text. They were able to represent some emotions but they were still leaving room for many interpretations. With emojis, there are many more options for representing emotions or text but it still can be a challenge if there is no text (prose) to accompany them. You can see from my image above, emojis alone, by themselves, still make it difficult for the reader to interpret.

For this task, I used the emojis from my Notes app on my iPhone. I tried to use emojis to represent words and ideas, not so much syllables. I started with the title and then worked my way through the plot. I chose to start with the title because I thought this would be the easy part and if I couldn’t use emojis to represent the title, then using them for the plot, I thought, would be near impossible. From the many emojis that I had access to with my iPhone I think I was able to do a decent job choosing them to represent what I was trying to describe. I selected each emoji and organized them in a way that I thought was best for the reader to interpret and understand. Using just emojis to communicate was not that simple as there was a limited selection of emojis to use and they were more difficult to access as opposed to the letters that are present on the keypad. Having completed this task, I have a better appreciation for using emojis and will most likely use them more when I text. I still prefer regular text but I can see the value emojis have especially when you can’t quite get your message across or convey your emotions using text alone. Overall, this was a fun challenge and I hope my readers can translate my Emoji story!

 

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

Grannan, C. (n.d.). What’s the Difference Between Emoji and Emoticons? Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/story/whats-the-difference-between-emoji-and-emoticons

5 comments

  1. Hi Grant, Really enjoyed your emoji story! I hope I’ve guessed Ted Lasso correctly? Too bad there isn’t an accurate emoji to depict the shortbread biscuits on the show!

    1. Haha yes, you are correct. I was actually looking for a shortbread emoji but I had no luck finding one. Maybe the popularity of this show will push them to make one. One can hope! Thanks for your response! 🙂

  2. I was just reading this and thinking you needed one as well! Your interpretation of the show in emoji form was very spot on. I feel like for mine it did not go as well.

  3. Bonjour Grant,

    You show great ability to choose your emojis with precision, and made it easy for me to recognize the show and plot (Ted Lasso). As you note in your blog post, “such icons are meant to put the verbal text in context, as the writer tries to enforce a univocal interpretation on prose that is otherwise open to many interpretations.” (Bolter, 2001, p.72)”

    I would agree on the point that there can be many interpretations when trying to read emojis. Some of the emoji stories I read from the collection that our class created were difficult to pick out, mostly because without actually knowing the complete plots of the particular stories being shared, certain symbols have no meaning. If I had never seen the series Ted Lasso on TV, I’m not quite sure I would have correctly picked it out from your emoji story. Although images, such as emojis, are always specific, full of meaning, and can pass on ideas, interpreting such images to their full extent is greatly aided by words and context.

    As Kress’ notes “Speech and writing tell the world; depiction shows the world (2005. p. 16).” I would argue that in the 21st century, the visual medium is more powerful than the spoken or written medium. As the world becomes more connected through the power of the Internet, the power of the image becomes more dominant as billions of them are passed across all parts of the globe. Language matters less, but in the end, still matters!

    I’m wondering about your experience when reading other people’s emoji stories? How easily did you pick out stories that you had never read or seen? I know you picked out mine, but had you already seen “No Time To Die”? Do you think you would have selected it correctly if you hadn’t seen the movie?

    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.

  4. Hey Mike,

    I actually haven’t seen “No Time to Die” but it’s definitely on my list. Your Emoji story was easy to guess because the emojis that you used clearly identified the title of the movie for me. Even thought I haven’t seen the movie, it is popular in the media and I’ve seen the trailer so that helped me guess. I think yours and the “Squid Game” emoji stories were the easiest but I did however struggle to guess a number of other stories. I think the story titles is key and I found the stories that had emojis that fit the meaning of the words worked best. With a limited amount of emojis as comparison to words it is difficult to write a plot with emojis. If the task was to just write the plot using emojis (no title) then this task would have been very difficult.

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