Symposium 6

One of the opening concepts that drew me in was Adrian stating “a word can only mean something by not what it is but by what it is not“. He mentioned semiotics and the large dictionary we have for words and other typical points. However the idea that was emphasised in my mind was who decides what every word means?  How does a certain word become a word? A friend had an assignment the other week in which she had to create a 27th letter for the English alphabet and the sound that goes with it. If we included another letter into the alphabet there would be thousands of new words, but who is going to create them?

Another question that Adrian posed was “have we lost all sense of privacy through technology?” I agreed with him on the notion that everything that we post online is 100% public and that we have lost all sense of privacy. For example, the other day I searched my name into google images and pictures of people vines that I have ‘re-vined’ are now under Claudia Nankervis on google images. The thought that just a simple tap on my phone to re-vine a post would then go onto google images, had not crossed through my mind at all. I have always been very cautious of the images that I post online and what I write, but this is another layer that I will have to think about as well.

Another example with internet privacy is the recent leaking of the naked photos of celebrities. Photos they thought would never be seen by anyone else, photos taken in the complete privacy of their home, are now on the internet for everyone and anyone to see. How somebody managed to get their hands on the photos through iCloud I will never understand, but it demonstrates to us that if we send or publish anything online or through the ‘interwebs’, we must be comfortable knowing that it may be seen by anyone in the world.

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