Category Archives: Identity

White Rabbit Postmodern April 11

Have we become the White Rabbit? The experience of Time in the Postmodern Era

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Have we become the White Rabbit in the Postmodern Era? Do we wear the watch or is the watch increasingly wearing us? How is our relationship to time changing at a semiotic level – are we thinking about time through different metaphors?

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eating yourself - semiotics of food identity October 19

Eating yourself: We consume identity through food?

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Food is central to the evolution of man and culture. Eating food performs a base nutritional function; it is its symbolic role in either supporting or differentiating individual, social and cultural identity that is more influential. We consume our identities through our food and drink choices. The changing nature of modern society is resulting to differences in what food communicates and how we use it to develop and express our identities.

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Personification of the City August 15

Why are we no longer in love with our Cities?

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Why are we no longer in love with our cities? We personify cities, give them human characteristics.

We create our identity from where we live. Are we projecting something, of how we see ourselves, onto our cities?

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Semiotics of the Doppelganger July 14

The Semiotics of the Doppelgänger: the Double in Popular Culture

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The Semiotics of the Doppelgänger: the Double in Popular Culture   One of the themes from the last blog I wrote on ‘evil’, was the nature of how this is depicted in popular culture from a semiotic perspective. This started out with a Kantian perspective, that evil is something that all of us have the […]

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Culture Decanted June 16

ARE ROBOTS TAKING OVER THE WORLD?

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ARE ROBOTS TAKING OVER THE WORLD? “Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.”― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein   In my last post, I was exploring why we are scared of the future, a fact that emerged is that there is no one word or phobia to cover ‘fear of […]

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Culture Decanted June 13

Opening a Window to the Future [Part 2]

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Why are we so negative about the future?: Future Part 2   “The future is like a dead wall or a thick mist hiding all objects from our view’ William Hazlitt, 1822   Cultural Metaphors of the Future One of the manifestations of the authenticity trend in society today is the cherry-picking what parts of […]

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June 02

What does a beard mean? [ Beards: Part 2]

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“We have now for many centuries triumphed over nature to the extent of making certain secondary characteristics of the male (such as the beard) disagreeable to nearly all the females – and there is more in that than you might suppose” C.S. Lewis Hair has a rich depth of symbolism that dates back to the […]

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June 01

The Hipster Beard [ Beards: Part 1]

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‘Trust the man who hesitates in his speech and is quick and steady in action, but beware of long arguments and long beards’. George Santayana     Beards are very topical at the moment, with the rise in popularity of the Hipster Beard. It’s probably worth attempting to explain what Hipsters are, although they may have […]

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May 29

I see my name in my soup [names: part 4]

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  “I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.” ― Henry David Thoreau, Walden   Is everything about me? From antiquity, there was power of knowing the names of things and naming the world. The way we use names and identity are changing in society, […]

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May 27

Names that shape us [names: part 3]

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People’s fates are simplified by their names. Elias Canetti   The preceding discussion, I was looking at the mythical and historical power in naming things. There is another aspect to this discussion is the power our names have over our actions: consciously and subconsciously. “…(there is) the sometimes quite grotesque coincidence between a man’s name […]

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May 27

The Signature Resigned [Names: part 2]

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Proper names are poetry in the raw. Like all poetry they are untranslatable. W. H. Auden It is easier than ever to have multiple identities online; allowing us to be the virtual persona we might wish we could be. At a time when individualism is a driving force in western society, it’s ironic that so […]

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May 26

The Power of Naming. [NAMES: PART 1]

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The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names.–Chinese Proverb Naming things is a human need. Naming things is how we make sense of the universe. Francis Bacon popularised the saying ‘knowledge is power’ and there is power in naming things.   It’s a common genesis story across a range of different […]

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