Review: Sounds of Then, Sounds of Now - Popular Music in Australia, Hobart

Book Revie

Some Notes on the Musical Landscape

Some Notes on the Musical Landscap

Review: Zwarte Hollanders

Book Revie

A Social Semiotic Theory of Synesthesia? - A Discussion Paper

After a brief survey of ideas about synesthesia in philosophy, science and the arts, this paper explores the common qualities of the parameters of colour, graphic shape (including typography), timbre and texture, hypothesizes a number of points of correspondence and argues for their semiotic importance in the contemporary multimodal communication of identity

Michel Pastoureau and the history of visual communication

Despite early and ongoing calls for a systematic engagement with history, social semiotics has largely emphasized research on the synchronic rather than diachronic dimensions of meaning-making. And while the ‘instability’ of semiotic practices (see Kress’s Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication, 2010) and the importance of semiotic change (see Van Leeuwen’s Introducing Social Semiotics, 2005) have become key themes in semiotics, there is still a need for a dynamic approach to the study of visual and multimodal communication, focusing not only on describing how meaning-making resources and their uses are changing, but also on why they are changing. In this article, the authors focus on the importance of the work of medieval historian Michel Pastoureau for the social semiotic study of visual communication, highlighting that this work can help us further refine and even rethink key social semiotic concepts such as modes and media, provenance, and context. Pastoureau’s work shows how we can make theoretical statements about instability, change and innovation more concrete and, ultimately, empirically based. His approach can also help us understand semiotic change and its relation to social and cultural (and also economic and technological) change more broadly, often with the aid of the (crucial) normative discourses that shape semiotic practices over time

Competition for status creates superstars: An experiment on public good provision and network formation

We investigate a mechanism that facilitates the provision of public goods in a network formation game. We show how competition for status encourages a core player to realize efficiency gains for the entire group. In a laboratory experiment we systematically examine the effects of group size and status rents. The experimental results provide very clear support for a competition for status dynamic that predicts when, and if so which, repeated game equilibrium is reached. Two control treatments allow us to reject the possibility that the supergame effects we observe are driven by social motives

The world according to Playmobil

Abstract This article looks at toys for very small children, an object of study that has been pursued in psychoanalysis (by Freud and Erikson, for example), but all too infrequently in semiotics. Specifically, it analyzes the social roles and identities called into play by the highly successful Playmobil figurines. In the Hallidayan tradition, the investigation foregrounds the importance of roles and actors in semiosis, paying close attention to roles/actors that are excluded as well as those that are included. As the essay argues, semiotic systems are always a mixture of a¤ordance and constraint. Playmobil (in contrast to Lego, for example) is shown to be stronger on constraints than a¤ordances, however. As a global brand and genre, the figures of Playmobil have the potential to influence nascent perceptions of the way that social actors operate

The CONSUMER, The PRODUCER and the STATE: ANALYSIS of a TELEVISION NEWS ITEM

This paper takes a detailed look at one news item, broadcast in March, 1981, by Channel 10 in Sydney. The item was part of the Actionline segment of Channel 10's Eyewitness News, a segment dealing with consumer affairs. It discussed a mail order company which, according to the then Minister of Consumer Affairs of New South Wales, Sid Einfeld, sold fake diamond earrings for a price far above their real value. The first part of the paper discusses the unedited text of the three interviews that formed part of the item. The text was transcribed from a cassette copy of the original soundtrack. In the transcription which follows below, the sections retained in the final edited version of the news item are in italics. Where a 'reverse angle question' (recorded after completion of the interview itself) was used, it has been added to the transcription in italics within brackets. The analysis of the unedited interviews focusses on three aspects: the types of process used to encode the reported events (d. Halliday, 1976); the kinds of question asked by the interviewer; and the construction of each of the interviews as independent texts, with emphasis on lexical and conjunctive cohesion (d. Halliday and Hasan, 1976)

Fight or flight:Endogenous timing in conflicts

We study a dynamic game in which players compete for a prize. In a waiting game with two-sided private information about strength levels, players choose between fighting, fleeing, or waiting. Players earn a “deterrence value” on top of the prize if their opponent escapes without a battle. We show that this value is a key determinant of the type of equilibrium. For intermediate values, sorting takes place with weaker players fleeing before others fight. Time then helps to reduce battles. In an experiment, we find support for the key theoretical predictions, and document suboptimal predatory fighting

Fight or Flight:Endogenous Timing in Conflicts

We study a dynamic game in which players compete for a prize. In a waiting game with two-sided private information about strength levels, players choose between fighting, fleeing, or waiting. Players earn a “deterrence value” on top of the prize if their opponent escapes without a battle. We show that this value is a key determinant of the type of equilibrium. For intermediate values, sorting takes place with weaker and more loss averse players fleeing before others fight. Time then helps to reduce battles. In an experiment, we find support for the key theoretical predictions, and document suboptimal predatory fighting