Design and Contemporary Culture Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Design and Contemporary Culture - Essay ExampleThe authors also highlight the importance of ideology in creating meaning by providing channels of interpretation for individual thought processes. The authors further define representation as the social production of meaning through sign systems. (p. 68) 2. Media interpretation is base on a plurality of values and perspectives. OBrien and Szeman introduce an example of a discussion of media violence in Canada to illustrate the way facts and figures can be used to support multiple or conflicting viewpoints in popular media. (pp. 69-71) As media sources form the public dialogue through which meaning is created in current society, the authors encourage questioning the effects of power, structure, and hierarchy on values that are disseminated in popular culture. 3. Signs are the fundamental units of communication (p.71). OBrien and Szeman seek to blow a fuse the concept of nomenclature from alphabetical arrangements and linguistic termi nologies to incorporate the full range of images, symbols, and objects that are used to express meaning in society. This leads to the incorporation of music, fashion, and body language into a greater definition or understanding of language, that can also be related to cross-cultural differences in morals, values, and collective understanding. (p.71) 4. Structuralism and semiotics in theory. OBrien and Szeman introduce the theoretical basis for structuralism and semiotics in linguistic analysis, stating that the implied meaning of words, signs, and language are less important than the grammatical relationships mingled with terms and their position in hierarchies of social power that are created through personal and collective awareness of systems of meaning in social groups. (pp.71-72) 5.Sausserian Linguistics and semiotics a new discipline. The modern understanding of meaning in language is in debt to Ferdinand de Saussure who is credited with inventing the genre or discipline of semiotics that is mean to study the life of signs within a society in a synchronic rather than diachronic or historical model of development. (p. 73) Similar theories were innovative by C.S. Pierce in America through psychological literature. (p. 73) 6. Mythological Interpretation in Barthes Cultural Theory. OBrien and Szeman discuss the work of Roland Barthes in mythical understanding to show how meaning is created socially from connotative values. (p.74) The symbols of mythology combine to fuse the essential values or ethos of a culture through chain(s) of associated concepts linking meaning, memory, and tradition, as in racial or humanistic identity structures. (p. 74) 7. Barthes Critique of Humanism. Barthes work engages mythology from the perspective of pop culture, as in the instance of The Great Family of Man exhibit in France in the 1960s. (p. 74) While humanism posits a natural unity of cultures and races, semiotics contextualizes this popular understanding in the contex t of history and difference, which suggests that the meaning derived from the symbolic patterns in the exhibit resemble the cultural understanding derived from mythology which then becomes fact via a shared societal acceptance of the value system. 8.