I have chosen to connect to Alexi’s Emoji Story, as seen here.
I think that Alexi’s story was obvious. I knew the show from the title. For a complex plot of Squid Game, Alexi summarized it well. As Alexi mentioned, the show held a lot of popularity, and a title may not have been necessary. I think even just seeing a squid emoji would have been clue enough – I can’t think of any other shows with a squid in them.
I noticed that Alexi had the word ‘US’ instead of an emoji, and I wondered if this was a technical glitch. I had a similar thing happen with number emojis, and it took a bit of playing around. I don’t think this took away from the story’s integrity, but visually it showed an inconsistency. I also really liked the use of a ‘plus sign’ emoji to show ‘and’ or ‘then.’ This was very clever! Funnily enough, I often use a + as a shorthand in my writing. Maybe this is why I knew right away that it was supposed to mean and? As mentioned by Alexi, punctuation and conjunctions were something that I found difficult to replicate. I, too, questioned if punctuation was necessary. I think it was a good addition because, like a written text, it helps the reader stop/pause before continuing.
In the write-up, Alexi noted how the emojis were in sequential order, similar to reading words on a page. I really like that Alexi pointed this out. It was something that I automatically did, but bringing attention to that idea made me intentionally think about how our brains go into autopilot in certain situations. This really connects to the purpose of this task and using text in place of images. As Bolter mentions, “the use of images for cultural communication is nothing new” (p. 54). Maybe that’s why I automatically read this the same way I would a piece of text; the order is nothing new.
Like Alexi, I also wanted to choose emojis I saw often. I appreciated Alexi mentioning the cultural relevance that the emojis lack making it difficult to differentiate people. I know on my iPhone, the emojis can be edited slightly to represent different races, but this wasn’t present on the computer version I used. Overall, Alexi did a great job and I enjoyed reading and relating to the emoji story.