Tag Archives: sci-fi

culture decanted September 21

Why are we taking the super out of the supernatural stories: another postmodern symptom?

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Why are we taking the super out of the supernatural stories: just another postmodern symptom? There is a tendency of modern films and TV shows to recycle supernatural stories by finding secular or mundane explanations for their supernatural themes. This trend is driven by the continuing postmodern agenda to find rational explanations for everything and challenge existing meta-narratives in culture. To illustrate this, ten examples of dominant supernatural themes are explored as having secular explanations for their plots.

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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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July 06

The Semiotics of Evil

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What is evil? In the postmodern Western world, evil is something that has become almost robbed of its ability to horrify us. Increased global communication and knowledge inure our responsiveness with a daily news diet of ‘evils’. In entertainment, with many of the anti-heroes of TV being serial killers or sociopaths, we’re becoming increasingly desensitised […]

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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 11

Why are we so scared of tomorrow? [Part 1]

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Why are we so scared of tomorrow?   To paraphrase the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, ‘humankind has never had it so good’. Well it’s probably more accurate to say that in many ways our collective-cultures have never been so advanced, with the potential of helping so many. So why do we find western culture […]

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