Friday, 17 August 2012

The Semiotics of Embodied Interaction… Horizon for Understanding

O’Neill, S. (2008) Interactive Media: The Semiotics of Embodied Interaction. London: Springer-Verlag.

“For Umberto Eco, for example, meaning is no longer an individual construct, as in the arbitrary semiotics of Saussure. It is now seen as the result of a process in which an individual takes part in society through the coding and decoding of his/her relationship with the cultural values and societal norms of the time.” (p72)

Annotation

Umberto Eco’s semiotics is far more embodied with an active relationship for a person, in their background culture and society, in interpreting the coding and de-coding of the norms for understanding. This makes any meaning arrived at not as an individual construct but one that is constructed from both the individual’s internal pre-understanding and external socio-cultural factors that form a horizon for the understanding. For Palmer (1969) the pre-understanding of the individual and the horizonality of the context in which the individual is interpreting the meaning dictate the terms in which any meaning is constructed.

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