The Machine is Us/ing Us

Comment by BO on February 20, 2010 at 2:52pm

Excellent. I suppose learning to write paragraphs using the topic sentence approach is akin to learning your A,B,C's. It should be taught in high school, not college. But alas, when I went back to school a few years ago, there were many in class who were barely literate. And many graduated remaining so. But then, we all know why...

Comment by pan on February 21, 2010 at 9:33am

Wish I was brilliant......that video provoked thoughts of the evolution of theories of semiotics.....I just hope I can understand it when someone writes about it.

Comment by waldopaper on February 21, 2010 at 6:44pm

Semiotics as a theory left me kinda unimpressed. It does confirm my "rhetorical" analysis of what's happening now. Example- peep this site:

Two million teabaggers in DC on 9/11/09... no doubt exaggerated... but from the photos, it looks as big as all the anti-war gatherings I have seen in DC since 2003. What does this mean? I believe it means that there are "sides" and they are polarized along lexicon lines. Look at the "signs." And peep some of the highly-unfunny "signifiers:"

...which appears that the bullet-heads are chest-thumping to shoot it out with the cops (which, to me. is a two-fer). Not to gloat and giggle... it could just as easily (and quickly) morph into a "hippie hunt" with just a few rhetorical/ semiotic twists by somebody who knows what they're doing. To stop that... seems to me the problem is: small vocabulary.

The bullet-heads make no distinction between socialism/ communism/ totalitarianism. Their core beliefs are: fuck an over-riding top-down "authority" and their power to make us pay the expenses to fuck with us... in other words, their major mojo is: "smaller government" and "lower taxes." Well, who-the-fuck wouldn't go for that? HOWEVER:

I know that when the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks lime a nail... but it seems to me the core of all this bullshit is a "small vocabulary" problem Whatever. What WE gotta do is make sure the small-vocabulary bullet-heads aint manipulated into hunting us down and killing us. How can "they" tell who "we" are? Whothefuck knows? The fatties will figure something out... and you can bet it will have something to do with an easily-identifiable "signifier."

What tools do you have to defend yourself? Is "defending yourself" desirable? Who the fuck is "you?"

Riddle me that,

Comment by BO on February 21, 2010 at 7:04pm

I dunno, Waldo. I think there an equal number of whack jobs on both sides of the 'lexicon.' Very few critical thinkers left. Most peeps need to be told what to think.

Glad I'm a natural born misanthrope. When the next civil war starts, I hope to be a referee.

Comment by pan on February 22, 2010 at 11:49am

Semiotics (which is primarily focused upon analyzing the word as sign) is most interesting/useful in my field for its applications to non-verbal signs such as movement, costume, light and sound. There really is no other approach that I have found that provides a truly useful analytical tool that isn't culturally biased.

What struck me about the video was the link (pun intended) between hypertext and unlimited semiosis

Speaking of semiotics and structuralism - picked up and read Barthes' S/Z. Even if you don't appreciate his approach, you have to be respectful of the depth of his line by line analysis.

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