Our task this week was to relate the title and plot of the last movie, book or TV show that we had watched or read using only emojis.
Reflection:
As someone not used to reading, let alone writing using pictures, beyond the use of graphical or pictorial elements of websites as Bolter (2001) describes, or emojis (I rarely use them for anything other than emphasis in texting) this was an interesting challenge to tell a story using emojis exclusively. I was surprised more by the emojis that do not exist, then those that do and as a result had to be creative in both individual and combinations of emojis to convey ideas and themes. I wonder if my students, or even some of the younger teachers at my school would find this an easier task as they are more adept at using emojis as a form of pictorial writing.
I started this activity with the title. I was proud that I was quickly able to determine a way of representing it easily with emojis. I chose to start with the title as it seemed like the logical starting point, and if I could not determine a way of representing it with emojis, there did not seem much point in continuing with the plot of a story I could not name. When it came to describing the plot of my story it became much more challenging. Through searching multiple emoji sites, it became apparent that many of the concepts I wanted to convey did not exist as emojis, and it was time to get creative. To simplify matters, I did not attempt to represent the names of most of the characters, but rather chose to describe their roles.
I would like to say there was forethought to choosing this story, that I had planned out how I might represent the plot of several different stories using emojis and chose the easiest, or most difficult, but sadly no. I chose this story as it was the most recent thing I had seen when beginning the task, as such I could remember the plot elements easily and did not need to refer to a summary of the episode to complete the task.
I struggled with certain concepts like the passage of time and movement in telling my story with emojis. As Bolter (2001, pg. 59) mentions picture writing, in this case the use of emojis lacks narrative power, the descriptors that we have become so accustomed to in phonetic writing just are not possible and we are left trying to find approximations.
In parts of telling this story, like the title, I used emojis syllabically, where the emojis stand for syllables within the word, while in other parts of the story the emojis are logographic with each emoji representing a distinct concept (Bolter, 2001, P. 60; Schmand-Besserat & Erard, 2007). This combination of uses of emojis made the task of writing simpler but is likely to complicate efforts to interpret their meaning without an established convention for the use of emojis and their individual meanings. The use of size for certain emojis was intentional, trying to denote the importance, hierarchy, and strength of characters much like in editorial cartooning.
I would be intrigued to see someone else’s depiction of this same story using emojis, to see how they chose to represent the themes and events of the story. How would they differ? Would there be similarities? Who two pictorial writers recognize that they are recounting the same story?
References:
Bolter, J. D. (2001). The Breakout of the Visual. In, Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print (2nd ed.). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781410600110
Schmandt-Besserat, D., & Erard, M. (2007). Origins and forms of writing. In C. Bazerman (Ed.), Handbook of research on writing: History, society, school, individual, text (pp. 7-26). Routledge.
Hello Mike, I just wanted to comment here, but I will be referencing your other post on potato printing quite a bit as well; I really dig your notation here about forethought and planning in regards to typing vs writing by hand. I tend towards the same, but inverted. I find I can write so much faster by hand, and often find myself writing in a very stream-of-consciousness style like you mention. In regards to emojis, I find it interesting that so many of us really had to deliberate and put so much forethought and contemplation into how we were going to use these silly little images in order to try and have a coherent plot/story that people can figure out (much like the time and effort it took to carve out a single word in a potato). It makes me wonder about the correlation between ease of communication and the amount of thought and effort we put into our own communication efforts. It almost feels like trying to speak to someone who does not speak the same language as us or has a very tentative grasp on the same language; we need to be slow, deliberate, and use purposeful language choices to try and reach a middle ground.
Hi Cody,
I used to be faster writing by hand, but I have found that after having to create so many documents for teaching and all of the assignments for the MET program, my speed of typing has increased dramatically, especially if I rely on spell check for spelling errors.
You make a very interesting point about the correlation about the ease of communication and the amount of forethought and effort we put into our communications. Though it does seem almost oxymoronic to thinks of something being easy the more effort we put into it.
I hadn’t considered the similarity between the emoji task and communicating with someone in a different language, but it makes so much sense in both cases we strip away as much of the nuance as possible to keep things as simple to understand as we can.
Mike