Jordon Lovig, linked above, did the emoji story task for the book White Noise. As Jordon indicated the title was easy to demonstrate in emojis and was easy to decode as well. However, I then had to google if White Noise was indeed a book- I thought it was a horror film. Never having read the book, I turned to Wikipedia to get an idea of the plot to see if the other emoji’s matched. Wikipedia first told me the main character was a professor of Nazi history and was surprised not to see reference to that in the story such as German flag and wondered if I got the title incorrect, leading me to check the comments for the correct answer (Wikipedia, n.d.). The story did have a graduation cap which was likely meant to express the university. In fact, the first sentence might be describing the main character- a man at the university who is scared of death which is consistent with the reflection (Loving, 2022) and Wikipedia (n.d.). The second sentence likely covers the remaining “central themes of the work …. consumerism and paranoia in the media”(Lovig, 2022). The third sentence represents the catalyst of the story, a chemical spill (Wikipedia, n.d.) but the last sentence confuses me. Does it represent the people who died in the spill? Wikipedia (n.d.) doesn’t mention any further deaths. Could it represent the central theme of mortality being emphasized by Lovig (2022)? I also found it interesting there is no mention of the near murder by the main character or the son riding a tricycle across a highway mentioned by Wikipedia (n.d.), as particularly the near murder seemed like an important plot point.
I appreciated the brevity of the emoji story, mine was quite long as a tried to summarize 8 seasons of How I Meet Your Mother. Jordon and I took different approaches in our translation in that he focused more on central themes while I did a word by word translation summary. The novel, being more philosophical, might better lend itself to ideas rather than plot. Jordon also didn’t use punctuation to create compound emojis as I chose to, completing the exercise closer to its intended design. Jordon’s use of central themes may have also made use of compound emojis less important. I read through a few stories before I could find one I could figure out, which shows the challenges of this task but also the diversity of media consumed by ETEC 540 students.
References
Lovig, J. (2022, June 28). Task 6: An Emoji Story. UBC Blogs. https://blogs.ubc.ca/jordon540/2022/06/28/task-6-an-emoji-story/#comments
Wikipedia. (n.d.). White noise (novel). In Wikipedia. Retrieved August 6, 2022, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Noise_(novel)