Friday, June 10, 2005

Signs without Signifiers

Commentators are plentiful that refer (ironically?) to the essentially self-referential nature of our popular culture. Does anyone know however if someone has written a book which looks a bit more deeply into this phenomenon?

Some questions that have occurred to me recently are:

- As people grow older within their popular culture they must be creating a map of it in their heads, partly indexical, partly symbolic. Does this mean that people within different age-groups perceive the connections differently?
- Are people living longer useful/youthful cultural lives?
- What specific attributes of the modern digital information media (speed, volume, storage etc.) are the biggest catalysts of denser, more reciprocal connections?
- Is meaning really becoming detached from its moorings and is this a cumulative process as Baudrillard would probably suggest.

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