Rifa’s Task 6 – An Emoji Story
https://blogs.ubc.ca/rlalani540/2021/10/17/task-6-an-emoji-story/
Reading the Emoji Story by Rifa brought a smile to my face because I could immediately identify which movie it was! We have multiple similarities in our experience. First, we both relied on words and ideas to look for a suitable emoji. Second, we both started the movie title to help others to figure out the genre of the story. Third, we both used the notes app on our phones to type out the Emojis. Last, we both had our struggles in finding the appropriate image to represent a word we wanted to describe.
When I’m thinking back at this activity, I think Emojis can express emotion in ways that are difficult with words. However, if we try to write a sentence using Emojis, we will find it very difficult, because we are thinking about words, not images. In Rifa’s post, she mentioned that Kress (2005) views words as “vague” and depictions and images as “specific” (p. 15). This is interesting because I can see that images can be specific and concise when an appropriate image is found, but images are also open to subjective interpretations. So people with different backgrounds and experiences might interpret different meanings from the same image.
It was unclear from Rifa’s post whether or not she also experienced difficulties with describing more abstract parts of the story as I did. I think it would have been interesting to ask everyone to also write down in text form their thought process of why they chose a certain picture. For example, in my post, I used the knife Emoji and the blood Emoji together to represent the concept of killing.
