Friday, 21 October 2016
Capitalism and Information society
In the reading of Capitalism and Information society, Christian Fuchs draws upon Frank Webster who identifies five ways of defining an information society: technological innovation, occupational change, economic value, information flows and expansion of symbols and signs. I was fairly intrigued and surprised at the fact that he mentioned "expansion of symbols and signs", what do you think he meant by this? How does this help define information society?
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I believe that what Fuchs and Webster mean but these defining factors has to do with materialism. I believe that semiotics play a large role in society when it comes to material capitalism because people usually want to be part of the hegemonic norm in order to be seen as socially acceptable. When conforming to the company's materialism and commodities, people are then participating in power relations where they are surrendering their freedom to these conglomerates. In an information society, people believe that if they consume in these branded materials based on symbols and signs, they will feel normal. People are willing to sacrifice money, time, an effort in order to become part of the hegemonic norm and once items have been socially constructed, more and more people will purchase the artifacts. Artifacts are socially malleable which greatly helps social infrastructures.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Jeremy, I also find that semiotics plays a major role in information society. More specifically, by how we as an audience come to associate meaning with the signs themselves. In this sense, it seems that we give ourselves over to companies in order to feel a sense of satisfaction when engaging with content. This overtime becomes normalized and we unconsciously don`t realize how we are acting when we are associating meaning with the content we are witnessing. When collectively everyone starts to do this, it should not be surprising when everyone starts to think the same in terms of how we associate meaning with the content we are engaging with Information societies.
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