01 AUG 2013 by ideonexus
Legal Perspective of "Semiotic Democracy"
"Cultural populists," . . . generally view popular culture as contested terrain in which individuals and groups (racial, ethnic, gender, class, etc.) struggle, albeit on unequal terms, to make and establish their own meanings and identities. As the populists see things, the consumers of cultural commodities (movies, songs, fashions, television programs, etc.) neither uniformly receive nor uncritically accept the "preferred meanings" that are generated and circulated by the culture industry. T...Also a way of saying "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder," in that entertainers have no control over how the viewer reinterprets their work.
16 JUL 2013 by ideonexus
Constant Surveillance Builds a Better Identity
There are some who argue that individuality
suffers under universal surveillance. When everything
about you is known, and you have little or
no control over how your identity is presented to
others, you become just another person in a mass
of similar persons. With no way to define yourself,
individuality is eroded. We all become everyman
and everywoman, or so the argument goes. To the
contrary, the amount of detail provided to everyone
around us in a transparent society helps to show
all of t...If people know a great deal about you with a simple web search before they meet you, social interactions are smoother.