Semi snooties
My kids love a book called "Big Truck and Little Truck," in which a little pickup tries to make his way through the big world. On one page, plucky Little Truck encounters what the book describes as "snooty semis."
Matthew and Jack often have near-total recall of the phrases in their bedtime books, but they somehow transposed "snooty semis" into "semi snooties." The word was too wonderful to correct at first, and over time I have come to find it of some use.
"Semi-snooty," for instance, is now the word that pops into my brain when the word "semiotic" is uttered within my earshot. Many are the crimes against common sense that have been committed in this word's name. But last week at the Stanford/Harvard ILaw seminar Terry Fisher used it in a context that actually made sense to me.
The phrase he used was "semiotic democracy," a term that apparently has been kicking around academe for some time but that I have not encountered before. Fisher described a "concentration of the power of meaning making" as a corollary to the concentration of media ownership and the prevalence of broadcast media technology. So if "political democracy" describes a system in which everyone gets to participate in the exercise of political power, "semiotic democracy" describes a system in which everyone gets to participate in the creation of cultural meaning.
Which sounds like a pretty great ideal to me. However far we may be from ever achieving it, it's a useful yardstick, something new to weigh in the equation of social value. And it is exactly what has attracted me over the years to the phenomenon of digital storytelling. Which leads me to...
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