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Record
- [What are the author’s main points?]
- Argues that every choice we make is a choice among signs, and what we choose is what creates us (45).
- That because culture changes over time, semiotics has a historical angle(50-51).
- [Key terms]
“consumer society”; “producer vs. consumer cultures” (53);
- Quotations (show page numbers)
“Mass production . . . creates consumer societies based on the constant production of new products that are intended to be disposed of with the next product year “(51).
- Paraphrase passages (show page numbers)
- America has changed from a producer to a consumer economy, and this is creating a new cultural mythos (52).
- The long example about what coffee means and how it has changed over time is an example of studying things historically AND semiotically (46-49).
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React
- [What do I think?]
If we’re making choices among a finite set of signs, how can there be any individuality at all? How can anything new ever emerge?
- [How does this fit in with my experiences and observations.]
This makes sense if you have money and live in a city, but if you’re poor and don’t have as many choices, he seems to be saying that then you’re not much because all you have are “signs.” He’s talking to other rich guys.
- [How does it contradict my own experience, or make me rethink my own assumptions?]
Right now, it seems like he can’t understand what it’s like to live on a farm or work at Mead.
- How might this author be doubted?
- [Are there contradictions?]
- [Where is this author/article confusing?]
What’s with the Snoopy picture?
- [What values, assumptions, interests seem to underlie this position and interpretation?]
To be one of the “producers” is to be poor. I understand that there’s no group of people sitting in backrooms making up cultural myths. It all grows out of the same cultural soil.
- [What do I want to bring up in class discussion? What do I need to understand better, or hear others’ reactions to?]
When I’m making something, say a graphic for an ad, will I automatically be serving some myth? It sort of my basic question: where’s originality in this semiotics thing?
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