This week’s topic “NetSpeak, Memes, Emoji’s & Participatory Culture” is a different topic with totally a different meaning to understand. After reading the articles and listening the ted talks. I came to know more about what the emoji is use for.
Starting from the article “Emoji Don’t Mean What They Use to do” the author said that the pictorial language has now moved away from the ideography and now is part of the illustration. And while moving so it lost the power of expression in this process. With every passing years, the number of emoji are being increased and giving people diverse options to choose from. People now are so dependent upon the emoji in order to express their emotions. The emoji that we use in our daily lives does not tend to mean what they represent. In the article the author said that “Pictograms are powerful because they are specific but flexible. The train can represent a light-rail line, a subway, a toy, and so on. A snowman can mean a literal snowman, or a warning that it’s cold out, or even a gripe about the office thermostat. The pleasure, and power, of emoji arises from the ambiguity inherent in picto-ideographic writing”.
In the next article “If It Doesn’t Spread, its Dead”, the author talked about the future of the entertainment world. The author further added that in the world of entertainment the people are so involved with the viral media and memes that we are lacking the connection with the real world. The author said that “Use of the terms “viral” and “memes” by those in the marketing, advertising and media industries may be creating more confusion than clarity. Both these terms rely on a biological metaphor to explain the way media content moves through cultures, a metaphor that confuses the actual power relations between producers, properties, brands, and consumers.”
The third article “Breaking up isn’t hard as it used to be on (Facebook)” has made the discussion even more interesting. The author in this article discusses the love of the modern world that as the world is growing fast so is the love life of the modern people. And now people find it easy to break up on Facebook and they do not even feel hurt about it. But one of the feature of Facebook makes it quite a difficult task to do. The memory list where your memories after a year will be shown and even you moved on it is still difficult to see those happy memories there.
In the Ted Talk “Memes and temes” Susan Blackmore she said that memes are like the virus that spread from brain to brain. She said that humanity has spawned a new kind of meme, the teme which spreads itself via technology.
All of the above discussion make me to think about the fact that how we have turned our lives from reality to digital world where in order to express the love, sadness, humor and excitement we are slaves of the emoji now.
What you think about this fact? Do you think that this digital life we are living is worthy?
For this week’s news post. I have chosen this article to share with you all in order to understand more about the emoji and their different meanings.
SOCIAL MEDIA & SOCIETY 
Hello, I enjoyed reading your article. I have to agree that emojis definitely have switched its meaning to symbols and that it is used increasingly and it is now more flexible. I myself use emojis and I use them to mean different things and I know other people have done so as well. I agree as well that it is a lot easier for people to break up over social media… its just the feeling of being disconnected and having even more options out there that it is hard have that sympathy at times. And also with the features such as blocking, you don’t need to see their feed or be reminded of a past relationship.
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Great work on this blog! I also agree about emojis meaning different things now a days, making increasingly difficult to understand what people are actually meaning. Personally I don’t use to many emojis, but when I do I use mostly the smiley face emojis. I think that blocking does help for not having to see past things from people that make you upset.
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