This was a fun and challenging task. I did start with the title because I’m ‘Type A’ and must start from the top. I relied mostly on words. I deliberately skipped articles, even in my thoughts, when summarizing the plot. It makes sense, though, since there aren’t emojis for articles. Instead of constructing sentences to express my summary, the way I usually would in conversation or writing; I broke it down to just nouns and verbs. For instance, instead of ‘a man fell in love with a woman,’ I used emojis for ‘man,’ ‘love,’ and ‘woman.’
I was frustrated with the emoji keyboard that I used on my computer for not having an emoji for the first word of the movie title. So, I switched to my iPhone, where I found a broader selection of emojis. I found this quite telling actually, in that, clearly developers spend more time creating emojis for mobile devices than they do for computers. Which speaks to the higher demand for emojis in the form of mobile messaging than from laptops. It also got me thinking about how limited I was by having to use digital emojis as opposed to the options I would have had if we were able to draw images.
After reading the Canva lesson and Bolter (2001), it became apparent how communication is inherently multi-modal. I suppose I should be thankful that laptops even have extensions that enable me to use emoji-keyboards. Bolter predicts these changes stating, “although these applications (email and news) have been purely textual, they are not likely to remain so, as the technology improves for transmitting graphics and digitized audio and video over the network. (2001, p.72)” I use emojis in my emails and text messages regularly. I find that they modify my messages by making them more personal. For example, at work, I have my Bitmoji account connected to my Gmail account, which allows me to send my students more personal Bitmojis message like ‘well done’. This aligns with Kress’ (2005) call to educators to critically engage with the affordances of new media rather than to conflate the decline of traditional media like.
References:
Bolter, J. D. (2001). Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print. Routledge. Chapter 4 The Breakout of the Visual
Kress, G. (2005), Gains and losses: New forms of texts, knowledge, and learning. Computers and Composition, 2(1), 5-22.
I had to do the same, create an Emoji story on my phone instead my laptop! I had a lot of fun creating it and realized that I lucked out on the simplicity of my movie. I was going through yours and I felt that I knew the film and yet I didn’t. As you mentioned, pronouns can be replaced by the vast amount of emoji identities on the keyboard but singular objects and nouns were harder to depict.