Emoji Story
I found this exercise very challenging indeed. I use emojis fairly often when texting with family and friends. I’ve found that they are particularly useful when trying to emphasize emotion. The emotion becomes a little bit tongue in cheek. Although at times a tear emoji really does genuinely tell how I might be feeling at that moment. I also find that the use of emojis is maybe easier when I know the people that I’m communicating with. So many friends would ‘know’ what I mean and could understand quite readily.
In my emoji post above I found that I couldn’t help but racializing it a fair amount. I found the moment of trying to articulate the story and layering in race to be weird. It was strange trying to decide on the exact tone of person from the event I was trying to describe. The event wasn’t particularly race based but I feel that my emoji story made it more about race. It might be more about race for me because I had to keep choosing which race to select. If we compare this to a podcast where it’s not visual at all and then the conversation can simply be colour blind. Particularly if the topic isn’t race based. Whereas here in the emoji story I had to rely on visuals and then I had to make some decisions based on the ‘race’ of the emojis. Now I suppose that the ‘yellow’ emoji could be construed as ‘race neutral’ but then we do still have to choose that character as opposed to any of the other ones.
The question that came up for me is – what actually is an emoji? And what are the drawbacks and limitations. Description was certainly a limitation. I know that emotion is what they can mostly communicate but there are a lot of things and flags that can represent. I found that I got stuck trying to fill in my description. I was longing to use words as opposed to just the pictures.
I think I might have faired better with a combination of words and emojis to tell the story. Although I’m sure I would have relied too heavily on the words if I’d had them as an option.
The question that I continue to circle back to as we look at different modes of communication is, ‘How is this mode of communication better than others and when is it best to use?’ Kress reflects on the shift from writing to other mediums of communication in his article Gains and losses: New forms of texts, knowledge, and learning. “In particular, it seems evident to many commentators that writing is giving way, is being displaced by image in many instances of communication where previously it had held sway. This realization calls forth a variety of responses, mostly negative, ranging from outright despair, anger and nostalgia to some still utopian voices on the other end of the spectrum.” (Kress 2005)
But I don’t think there needs to be despair but instead so long as we continually reflect and critically examine the question that I ask, then we can choose the correct form of communication. It’s interesting to note that Kress’ article was in fact communicated as a lecture before it was a piece of writing… “In this context, the purpose of my talk is to provide…”(Kress 2005). So was his article an article or was it a talk? Should it be published as an audio file instead or should it have been video recorded and published in that form or should it be available for all in all forms? (Emoji Wink)
References
Kress, G. (2005). Gains and losses: New forms of texts, knowledge, and learning. Computers and Composition, 22(1), 5-22. doi:10.1016/j.compcom.2004.12.004