The Untold Truth Of Emojis
As a true classic of the American Renaissance, Herman Melville's Moby-Dick has been translated into numerous languages and is available the whole world over. And now, thanks to Eyebeam's Fred Benenson, anyone can read the novel in the universal language of emoji.
In 2009, Benenson launched a Kickstarter campaign to produce copies of the hefty 19th-century novel written only using emojis. Naturally, one can't help but wonder why. In an interview with The New Yorker, Benenson answered that question, telling the magazine that he was "interested in the phenomenon of how our language, communications, and culture are influenced by digital technology" and wanted to "confront a lot of our shared anxieties about the future of human expression." The results are, indeed, strange.
As to why he chose Melville's Great American Novel, Benenson needed a work in the public domain that was large enough to truly demonstrate the scale of Amazon's Mechanical Turk, a service that pays humans small sums for repetitive tasks that can't be automated. After testing a couple chapters, he realized that Melville's book about a "huge, seemingly insurmountable challenge, told using metaphors and stylized language" was indeed a match made in heaven.
What would actually be helpful is translating James Joyce's Ulysses into emojis since no one can understand the English version.
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