I had heard about the “Emoji Dick” novel, the first novel translated completely into emojis, on this podcast that I really love (No Such Thing as a Fish). I thought the idea was funny and novel (no puns intended) but that it would likely be super frustrating to read. I have not changed my mind about the usefulness of emojis after completing this task. There are certain affordances of emojis, to convey feeling or emphasize a point but I don’t believe emojis are the best visual to express meaning.
I found this task much harder than I thought it would be. I began by trying to describe the title with the idea of the entire film. I thought I might make it a “say what you see” puzzle (example of that here) but the title I chose was a little too short to really do that with, so instead I used a more general idea of what the movie was about.
The plot, which upon reflection is very simple, was remarkably hard to describe using emojis. I could not find the images that I was looking for in order to describe the characters and plot accurately. I looked for certain emojis, but they did not exists. Then I tried using something that was close, but really wasn’t ideal. I found myself shocked that certain emojis don’t exists yet. I know (also from the podcast mentioned above) that there is an emoji council in Japan and a single man who gets to approve/reject the new emojis. After this task I feel that I could suggest a few emojis that I found missing. It was especially difficult to represent the characters. One of the defining features of the “male” emojis is that they all have a moustache but the male lead in this movie doesn’t have one. The choices for hair colour and skin colour etc are limited and it is difficult to find an emoji that usefully represents that person.
After spending over half an hour scrolling through the possible emojis and trying to get the title and the plot described well enough for anyone to guess, I had a look over it and realized that I was maybe still too general. I hope that it can be guessed, and I look forward to seeing if anyone can get it!
I think Emojis are really useful to get tone across in a text or respond without words to a quick message but they are not a useful tool for describing any complex story lines. There are too many possible interpretations for almost every emoji.
Photo by Denis Cherkashin on Unsplash
DeirdreDagar
February 19, 2021 — 20:55
My guess is…Speed?
You brought up an interesting point around the use of emoji and identity. The limitations to hair and skin colour are an interesting issue, because some have argued that the introduction of a range of skin tones in 2015 ended up making the emoji even more problematic (Tutt, 2015). And some folks like Aditya Mukerjee (As cited in the Atlantic) have suggested removing the racial emoji altogether. The intersection of race and emoji brings about some very important discussions about power structures, privilege, and identity.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/04/10/how-apples-new-multicultural-emojis-are-more-racist-than-before/
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/05/white-people-dont-use-white-emoji/481695/
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2018/03/21/425573955/white-skin-black-emojis
megan cleaveley
February 21, 2021 — 07:56
Hi Olivia,
I’m 95% sure that I have deciphered your choice of movie. I think your choice of emojis is succinct and to the point and makes it very clear. So much so, that I’m very confident in having got the right ‘answer’ despite never having seen the film, and only having been exposed to the plot via references in popular culture.
I agree with your last point about using emojis to convey tone or for a quick response, that represents the majority of my use of emojis. I too, struggled with conveying anything complex. In the story I chose there was a plot point that is very central to the plot that I was unable to convey using emojis without trivializing it, so ultimately I chose to omit it, even though in any other context I would be sure to touch on it.
Anne Emberline
February 22, 2021 — 20:50
Very nice! I’m fairly certain I know this movie as well. I’ve had a hard time deciphering a lot of the emoji stories this week but yours seems fairly straight forward. And now I want to watch this movie again 🙂