Semiology as the Study of Signs and Symbols - Essay Example

Semiology. Semiology is the study of signs and symbols, both individually and grouped in sign systems. It includes the study of how meaning is constructed and understood. Semioticians also sometimes examine how organisms make predictions about and adapt to their semiotic niche in the world (see Semiosis). Semiotics theorises at a general level about signs, while the study of the communication of information in living organisms is covered in biosemiotics or zoo semiosis. Also in broader terms defined semiosis as "...action, or influence, which is, or involves, a cooperation of three subjects, such as a sign, its object, and its interpretant, this tri-relative influence not being in any way resolvable into actions between pairs." Henry Stubbes (1670) uses the term for the first time, then spelt semeiotics semeiotikos, an interpreter of signs, in English in a very precise sense to denote the branch of medical science relating to the interpretation of signs. John Locke (1690) used the term semeiotics of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Here he explains how science can be divided into three parts: All that can fall within the compass of human understanding, being either, first, the nature of things, as they are in themselves, their relations, and their manner of operation: or, secondly, that which man himself ought to do, as a rational and voluntary agent, for the attainment of any end, especially happiness: or, thirdly, the ways and means whereby the knowledge of both the one and the other of these is attained and communicated; I think science may be divided properly into these three sorts. Evolution of Dazed and Confused. Dazed and Confused is the all-time classic high school nostalgia movie. Any other conscious fellow, who grew up in the 1970's, must have had a glance of this prolific movie, but I still love this picture and try my best to relate. The most well written stoner film of all time, Dazed and Confused is fun on every level. Every character is unique and hilarious in their own way. Picture's set on the last day in 1976 encompassing a bunch of kids of different age groups, all going through diverse experiences. Among are eighth graders preparing to enter high school. The local tradition is that on the last day of their school year, the seniors of the high school, all in an attempt to capture and paddle them brutally chase around the incoming freshmen. There are also the groups of high scholars, including the football players. The players have been forced to sign a pledge of no drug use during the summer if they wish to play in the fall. One of them, Randall Floyd (Jason London) decides he is not going to sign it. His teammates are pressuring him though, because he is needed to make the team a success in the fall. He is facing a seemingly complicated moral dilemma that only a high scholar would take seriously. The most tremendous memorable performance of the picture goes to Matthew McConaughey, who plays David Wooderson. Wooderson is a man-child who never grew up. He still hangs out with high school kids and always wants to know about the incoming crop of freshman tail. He is an absolute loser, but you find yourself wanting to be just like him. He has no worries. Life is so easy, and he never has to grow up. With the shift in technological trend Dazed and Confused impress the new digital wave in propagating for young talent. So they resort on producing powerful pretty awe-inspiring DVD, s tainted in colors that are pretty vibrant and there is minimal grain on the picture, which is impressive because so much of it is set at nighttime. The audio is Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 is surround and its great. The movie was featuring one of the best soundtracks of all time, and it really kicks on this disc. Dazed and Confused a film that is impossible to dislike and even ignore. If you don't enjoy yourself when you're seeing this one, there may be something seriously wrong with you. Definitely check this one out. Cultural Convergence The trends to identify in this theme fall loosely under the heading of "cultural convergence". This is a terminology that has been coined to reflect the fact that the technological convergences being discussed in the information and entertainment industries actually build upon a complex series of cultural and social shifts that are redefining how we relate to media and popular culture. Anyone who wants to see what convergence looks like should visit my house and watch my adolescent son, sprawled on the living room rug, watching a baseball game on our big-screen television, listening to techno on his CD-player, and writing e-mail to his friends. At the moment, the technologies aren't talking to each other. They're on different sides of the room. But, it doesn't really matter very much in cultural terms: consumers are already using different media and their contents in relation to each other. Sociologists are starting to refer to the "N Generation," the "Net Generation," or "Gen.Com", children who have come of age in relation to interactive technologies and digital media and who operate under the rather bold assumption that they can be active participants shaping, creating, critiquing and circulating popular culture. "Cultural convergence" describes new ways audiences are relating to media content, their increased skills at reading across different media and their desires for a more participatory culture. If technological convergence ever amounts to anything more than a marketing gimmick, then it is going to be because we have become invested in the transformations media content undergoes as it circulates from one context into another. If we are going to be culturally invested in interactive television, it is because our culture has come to value our interactions with television and to perceive television content as a resource in our social interactions. The media industries actively promote the fantasy of a more participatory culture, describing consumption through images of "empowerment." The myth of the "digital revolution" has been a primary aspect of the marketing of personal computers, going back to the "1984" ad campaign that paved the way for the introduction of the Apple computer into the home. As Ted Friedman has argued, this campaign stressed the grassroots and emanicipatory potential of the home computer as a contrast to previous stereotypes of the computer as a centralized and all-powerful technology for the office. The Apple computer is remarkably recognised, as a liberatory force that shattered the control of Big Brother and called into question the conformist logic of its competition. Macintosh continues to call on its consumer to "think different," linking its consumer goods to an alternative cultural logic. Such advertising seems to promise us that through our use of home computers will give us a new and more powerful relationship to corporate culture. The spread of net access has been shaped by science fictional representations of cyberculture as a resistant subculture, the embrace of digital technology by such "alternative culture" figures as Timothy Leary and John Perry Barlow, and the political and cultural fantasies promoted by publications such as Mondo (2000) One can, of course, dismiss such images as the deceptions of corporate marketing, except they have also shaped how the on-line community perceives itself, how it thinks about its relationship to the technology, and the standards to which it is increasingly holding e-commerce accountable. There is a resistant political culture on the web that is deeply suspicious of "big brother" and translates itself into campaigns against "spamming," for Internet privacy, against monopolistic concentrations of wealth and power, and for more democratic access to cultural resources. As writers like Jon Katz note, consumers of computers have a nasty habit of becoming "netizens. Visual Effects In 1982, Disney released the movie Tron, the first film incorporating large amounts of computer graphics. (Actually it only included about 15 minutes of actual graphics. The rest of the film was drawn art designed to look like computer graphics, whereas today's films are often full of computer graphics being used to look like more naturalistic things). The film was not successful at the box office, possibly because as well as being made by computer nerds, the film was also about computer nerds, and what might be referred to as the Silicon Valley culture was at that point extremely marginal, particularly in pop cultural terms. (Having said that, the film was set in Los Angeles, but I will forgive it that). However, for those of us that saw it, the film was rather mind blowing. It became a tremendous influence on many people working in computer animation and special effects today, and on people who were inspired by that technological culture in general. When these things did become mainstream, many of the people who were behind the scenes were people who had loved Tron. However, the people who made Tron itself generally did not prosper from it. The film was too far ahead of its time, and Hollywood did not know what to make of it or what to do with the people who had made it. In what now seems staggering given that this is possibly the most groundbreaking film ever made from a special effects point of view, the film did not receive an Academy Award nomination for Best Visual Effects. This was partly because the film was perceived as a failure, and the academy doesn't often reward failure, but it also had to do with a peculiarity of the Academy Awards nomination process, which is that (usually) the people who nominate films in a particular category are those who have been nominated in that category before. In 1982 "Special Effects" meant mattes (ie drawn artwork) and models. Using computer graphics was seen almost as "cheating", and as a minimum an entirely different thing from what members of the Visual Effects branch of the Academy did. So, no nomination. (Things have changed since then. A couple of years ago I made an observation to another blogger that Master and Commander had excellent effects, and in response I was told that they were "not special effects", because it was done with models in a tank in Mexico rather than with computer graphics. To many people today, "special effects" means computer graphics, and that References. Sebeok, Thomas A. (1977). A Perfusion of Signs. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Culler, Jonathan (1975). Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Danesi, Marcel & Perron, Paul. (1999). Analyzing Cultures: An Introduction and Handbook. Bloomington: Indiana UP. http://www.wilwheaton.net http://www.dustindiamond.comFACT: http://wileywiggins.blogspot.com. http://www.confused.co.uk Read More