Place: part 2

One of the things from this reading that stuck out to me was the response to the phenomenological ideas about place with the theory that if we are conscious, we must be conscious of the place we are in; that this is a part of what makes us humans. Human's always have a need to place themselves in a context, it helps us to understand ourselves, and our importance to that around us. Whether we are waking up and realizing the place we are sleeping, or in our daily life and how we understand our relation to the places we travel through, the places we stop, or the places we care about.

Place Intro

The intro to this book had some interesting ideas that the author had collected from other sources, and the one i liked best was Yi-Fu Taun's description of place. His idea of a place versus a space was that a place was simply a space where you pause for something, thous bestowing it with meaning and making it a place. Space is the empty and unmeaningful void that exists between spaces; it is what we travel through to reach one place from another. This better than all the other grasps at defining the idea of place struck me to be the most true. Anywhere can be a space if we don't care about it. Ideas of place and space are very personal and a very biased in their nature. It is entirely based on the experience and feelings of the individual. Places are differnet to everyone in them. The idea that your places, like the room you live in, have been different places for many other people, people you will never know, and they hold many meanings for reasons you will never understand. People need to make the spaces they inhabit their own places, they need to nest, to make themselves comfortable, to be happy. The nebulous concept of place wether we can define it or not is something we all understand.

reaction to Signs

The majority of this article seemed to reiterate the same fairly simple concept in the most obtuse language possible over and over again. This concept was the idea that a sign is anything and everything which evokes the thought or idea of something else to us. If we see an open sign on a store we know the store is open, or the same sign on a box means to open the package. its not the sign that carries the meaning, but how it represents instructions, ideas or feelings to other people. language is simply sounds which indicate instructions or ideas in repeated patterns, and the written word is only a visual extension of that set of signs. words are visual signs which make us think of the auditory signs which then in turn give us the information that is assigned to them.

Response to Denotation, Connotation and Myth

There were many conflicting and varied opinions given along with several examples, so I'm going to speak to what i found most interesting. I liked the concept that all signs, objects, words and symbols have a connotation in some capacity. that there is nothing that exists that can give us some sensory signal or directive without also imparting to us some connotative information as well. everyone and everything has some level of additional meaning and relation to something that is recognized by people in different ways. I also found the description of the myth an interesting concept. that as a culture we will distill all the connotations, thoughts and feelings about a particular subject, object or image down to the simplest and easiest to digest package which is then accepted as the natural and most logical meaning for it. We sift out all the details which actually give the thing its power and meaning and strip them away to make the simple, black and white categorizations easy labels to attach to everything.