With Riverside far behind on state housing targets, candidates in three ward races outlined their approaches to growth, density and neighborhood character.
Welcome back, you snack time semioticians! Last week we upcycled an empty chip bag and found much more than crumbs. They capture our eyes using bright colors like tiny grocery shelf billboards; they trigger nostalgia as real as their ingredients. If you studied the symbology on a tortilla chip bag like it belonged in a museum, or composed No. 2 in Sodium Major using the distinct sounds of a chip back crushed underfoot, I hope bringing several minutes of creative thinking into your week was a well-deserved treat.
This week, weâre moving from snack wrappers to the tiny symbols we liberally sprinkle across our modern messaging: emoji.
Emoji are one of those inventions that seem decorative and optional until you try to imagine texting without them. I send a naked âokayâ reply to my wife and it sounds harsher every time I reread it. Add a đ and it becomes polite. Add a đ and it becomes efficient. Add a đŹ and it becomes a tiny apology.
The original emoji set was created in Japan in 1999 by Shigetaka Kurita; tiny 12-by-12 pixel symbols designed to make mobile communication more useful and expressive. The word âemojiâ itself comes from Japanese words meaning âpictureâ and âcharacter,â not from âemotionâ as I thought before writing this column.
Which emoji you use, avoid, misunderstand, or aggressively repeat can say a lot about your age, your friendships, and your work/life balance. Some emoji have near universal meanings, others adapt readily in new environments. Some have meanings that change by generation, community, or time of day (or night) the message is sent. This makes them similar to the words they try to helpâalive, shared, misused, reclaimed, and occasionally dangerous in the wrong hands.
A red heart is not always just a red heart. A folded-hands emoji might be prayer, gratitude, a high-five, or âplease let this meeting end.â We learn emoji the way we learn slang: by watching, guessing, asking someone younger, making mistakes, and surviving.
That may be their real staying power of emojis in whatever form of communication takes over our lives next! For now, they add tone to address the downsides of instantaneous communication. Emoji deserve our creative attention because they are doing real work in tiny spaces.
They soften, sharpen, decorate, and disguise our true intentions. They help us confess, flirt, warn, make amends, and occasionally make everything worse. A little calculated risk is not a bad thing when it comes to exercising our creative side! Choose a favorite emoji or a few deep into that drop down menu, then give it several minutes of creative attention with one or more of these symbolic nudges:
1. Insight: Choose one emoji you use often. Study it closely. Is the smile sincere or hostage-like? Are the eyes doing most of the work? How does it present across devices? Now imagine itâs discovered 500 years from now by confused space tourists digging through the ruins of our cloud storage. Will it be useful shorthand or hieroglyphics to them?
2. Sound Out(side):Pick five emoji and give each one a sound. Perform your emoji alphabet out loud. Turn it into a chant, beatbox routine, commercial break, or dramatic reading.
3. Pokemoji: Notice how different emoji feel as gestures. A heart is a loop and a pinch. A smile is a curve. A lightning bolt is a sharp interruption. Now draw one emoji using only continuous lines, dots, scratches, or prints.
4. Body Language: Before emoji set the tone, bodies did this work, during in person communication. For most of human development, this was the only form of communication possible. Shrugs, eye rolls, finger guns, crossed arms, bowed heads, raised eyebrowsâŚtheyâre only possible with a human body. Translate one or more of these into a sketch drawing of a bespoke emoji.
5. Build IRL: Build a physical version of an emoji using objects you can touch. Use buttons, rocks, leaves, bottle caps, even some more chip bags! This might be a good day to tackle that junk drawer clean up youâve been too busy to do.
Emoji remind us that words are a small part of a successful digital message. These little images help us share feelings across distance, sometimes elegantly, sometimes confusingly. The humanness they bring to long-distance chat is worth the risk.
If you choose to invite more creative play into your week, keep noticing the emojis you send and receive. Notice your go-to when it gets awkward, which ones make you smile in real life. Retire one that no longer serves you. Invent a new one your friend group clearly needs.
This column was written with the help of ChatGPT, used here as a creative collaborator and emotional support pictograph translator.
