Task 6: An Emoji Story

When choosing a movie title to create with emoji’s I thought of all my favourite movies and then decided to chose the easiest title (or what I thought anyways) was to create using symbols. I quickly learned this was a difficult task to complete because the symbols that I used that in my opinion made sense to me did not to others around me. I would create a line of emoji’s and ask my siblings what they thought I was trying to describe. Since this movie is also their favourite childhood movie I assumed it would be easy for them to decode but that was not the case. While I used emoji’s as more as a symbol to describe an idea or action, others trying to decode the emoji’s were using the symbols as more literal terms or words symbolized as the emoji. For example – the title of the movie as I have shown it in emoji form is more symbolic of the movie title instead of what the literal emoji’s are – as my brother guessed “Hamburger Man Lifting?” I started with the title because I felt it was the easiest way to start off and then followed by the plot as best as I could.

I relied heavily on using emoji’s that represent ideas and some words however I also struggled with this because the symbols can have several different meanings depending on how it is interpreted. For example, I used a sun, which could mean so many different things – sunshine, warmth, daytime, when my intention was for it to simply represent “summer”. I think this task would be easier to decode if the person reading the symbols was instructed on what each emoji is supposed to mean, since we cannot assume that each person would have the same understanding of each emoji. When we text we learn what each emoji means simply by interacting with one another and using them in communications where there is essentially a societal agreement or understanding on what that symbol means. Language, even in symbolic emoji form, is constantly shifting and evolving and the meanings of different symbols are determined through the way we interact with one another as a learned process. Since we interpret and understand some symbols differently, it would be extremely difficult to communicate simply via symbols as this task demonstrates unless there was a widespread rule or understanding about what each symbol fundamentally means.