I have to admit that I was a late adopter when it comes to emojis. Perhaps out of snobbishness, I found them unnecessary and made a deliberate choice not to use them.
That changed nearly overnight when I moved to Egypt. There, Whatsapp was the platform of choice for communication, and even much of my professional communication was over Whatsapp. And not only that, but much of this communication was in English between people with many different language backgrounds. Most of the people I was texting with were Egyptian and spoke Arabic, but there were also Canadians, Americans, Russians, South Africans, Nigerians, and Germans. Messages without emojis were often perceived as being rude or curt and I quickly adapted to including one at the beginning of text conversations to help convey my tone. After living there for three years, the use of emojis while texting has stuck with me.
Since then, I have continued to use emojis, some might say fairly prolifically. For fun, I went into my phone to see what my most recently used emojis are and I was not surprised by what I found.
Had I been asked to predict my top 10 emojis, most of these would have appeared. These are the ones that will convey my mood or tone. For example, “Great staff meeting today” and Great staff meeting today ” read very differently, though the words have not changed.
In creating my emoji story, I found it difficult at times because emojis I thought existed, didn’t, or they weren’t exactly what I wanted. It took some effort to generalize the plot a bit more in order to find the appropriate emojis to convey the plot points I was focusing on. There was also the issue of hoping that some of the emojis would mean the same thing to others, which I hope I achieved here, although there are a couple that I’m not sure about. In any case, good luck, and I hope you can decipher it!
Title:
Plot:
Rachel
February 22, 2021 — 3:49 pm
Hi Megan,
I haven’t had a chance to watch shows and movies in the past year or so and I’m rather rusty in decipher your emoji story. At first glance at your emoji title, I thought it could be “Full House” then I said “Nah” when I looked at the plot. ;p
With the use of emoji, I think there was a time when I was rather hesitant to use it in my text conversation. It felt almost “improper” or sometimes too cheesy to do that. However, I do that very often now and sometimes emojis help to convey meanings or sentiments more accurately than words. I’d be curious to hear your experience using emojis with people from different cultural backgrounds, do most emojis share universal meanings?
megan cleaveley
February 23, 2021 — 9:19 am
Hi Rachel,
I have found that there is some amount of universality when it comes to emojis. Most people I text with from various cultures tend to use them in similar ways to convey similar meanings, which is super interesting! I wish I knew more about how emojis were used between cultures and within cultures because now I am really curious. I have to say though, I have noticed that when I am texting with people that have a first language different than my own (whether texting in English with people whose first language is not English, or texting in French) those conversations seem to include a lot more emojis (on both ends) than when I text with people whose first language is also English.
Reflecting on it now though, it seems as if there has been a shift lately into using gifs instead of emojis in these instances. Which is interesting, because some of them are universal and some (clips from movies or television shows for example) require a lot more shared knowledge than an emoji would.
Ying Gu
February 22, 2021 — 9:44 pm
Hi Megan,
Oh my gosh, I laughed so hard reading your emoji story. The plot of this show is indeed comical when broken down to its simplest terms. Love how you represented the title as well.
megan cleaveley
February 23, 2021 — 9:23 am
Thanks! I agonized over how to represent the title so I’m glad it came across!