Tag Archives: Star Wars

Scales of Lady Justice December 13

Is Popular Culture influencing our perception of Justice?

Much of 2014 has been dominated by stories of Justice, Law and Injustice. If popular culture is a reflection of society and culture, what do the changing storylines of law-and-crime suggest about how we feel about Justice? Do these stories influence the way that we see our own societies? This can be illustrated by looking at the structures of some of the more successful film and TV shows.

The psychology of the maze July 31

The Psychology of the Maze as a Modern Symbol

    Why are we still a-maze-d by labyrinths? With a diverse range of permutations, the Maze is a symbol that has been with humanity since the pre-historic era. So pervasive is the labyrinth within human symbolic communication, it is impossible to think of a human era where it was not a deep structural metaphor […]

Semiotics of the Doppelganger July 14

The Semiotics of the Doppelgänger: the Double in Popular Culture

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 […]

July 06

The Semiotics of Evil

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 […]

Culture Decanted June 13

Opening a Window to the Future [Part 2]

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 […]